Книга: Star Dragon Box Set 1-5
Contents
Patrol Cutter: Bellerophon!
Untitled
Tin Can Pirates
Untitled
Birth of the Star Dragon
I. Criminals
Desperation
Field Agent
Wormhole
Maximus
Tea Room
The Arsenal
Disguised
Constable Baker
Underworld
Witness for the Prosecution
Travelers
Hurquar
II. Hunters
Examination
The Arsenal
Br’er Rabbit
Dreams
The Hunter
Plainclothes
Made
Gazelles
Hunted
Rescued
Escaped
Safe
III. Heroes
Morning
Warlord
Square One
Awakening
Closing The Trap
Ant Hills
Confrontation
Overlord
Getaway
Prisoner
Constable
Flight of the Star Dragon
Vanir
Constable
Crime Boss
Scientist
Hunters
Fugitive
Officer of the Court
Scientist
Draco-form
Prime Investigators
Omelets
Tip
Into The Shadows
Cotton Candy Skies
Possibilities
Haberdasher
On The Run
Lifeblood of the Grace
The Red Carpet
Showtime
Dinner
The Chase
Paparazzi
Relentless
Nightfall
Yet Higher Mathematics
Witness
Home
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
Patrol Cutter: Bellerophon! An Earth Force Sky Patrol File: Solar Year 2382
“Commander, I’m receiving an emergency distress signal.”
Gareth set down the history book he had been reading and sprang into action, pausing only to stuff his feet into his tall, black leather, Sky Patrol boots and check his maroon tunic and blond hair in the mirror. The SP logo on the front still made him proud, every time he gazed upon it.
“On my way, Radioman Ferrie,” he pushed a button and called back. “Roust the Chief and have him bring the reactor to full power.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the man replied.
For luck, Gareth placed a hand on the wall-painted logo of his ship, the Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, as he exited his cabin into the hallway. It was his first command and he was responsible for the lives of eleven other men, and whoever else needed his help.
He was Sky Patrol.
The bridge on the space cutter was cramped, with walls needing a fresh coat of white paint and gray carpet that should probably be replaced in another few patrols, but this was a working ship, not a pleasure yacht. Stuff happened.
Outside the big window that stretched across the front of the bridge, the black depths of space waited, speckled with thousands and thousands of stars in the firmament of heaven. Gareth recognized Spacer First Class Atkins at the strip’s wheel by the man’s solid maroon neckerchief and broad shoulders. It took a lot of muscle to spin the ship’s helm-wheel while simultaneously pulling and turning it, but Tom Atkins was the man for the job.
Omar Ferrie was hunched over his radio gear, alternatively spinning knobs and plotting things on the tabletop with an electronic compass as he worked his tech magic. His gray kepi cap was pushed way back on his head as he scratched the side of his temple in apparent frustration.
“Have we got a vector, mister?” Gareth asked, coming up behind the radioman and putting a companionable hand on his shoulder.
“Almost, sir,” he said. “It’s down in the asteroid zone, but I’m picking up a lot of interference.”
“Well, then, Omar,” Gareth laughed, turning to Atkins. “Let’s get you a better view. All ahead full, pilot. Since the radioman said down in the rocks, bring us to starboard and nose her over. Pass us under 624 Hektor for now, but be on the lookout for smaller rocks that might do us harm.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Atkin called, louder than necessary, but better that everyone hear than somebody miss. “Starboard dive at full speed, navigating off asteroid 624 Hektor.”
The ship seemed to leap like a greyhound, quivering with the pent-up power of the latest atomic pile reactor and the Choueiri Arcjet Ionic Drive. Gareth placed a firm hand on Ferrie’s seat as the ship came about, like a clipper turning into the wind of a hard storm back on Earth.
Gareth reached out a strong hand and flipped a radio button on the overhead console to open the public address system.
“Medbay, this is Dankworth,” he called. “We’re responding to a distress signal. Make sure your little, black bag is ready to go.”
“We’ll be prepared, commander,” Bennie Vitro replied. The man was only a Spacer Third Class, but he knew his way around, from setting broken bones after bar fights to curing the worst hangovers. Gareth was glad to have the man with him.
“Mayday. Emergency. Somebody, please help us!” a voice came from the speakers suddenly.
“By the Gods of Vashal,” Gareth reacted. “That’s a woman. Why didn’t you say something, Ferrie?”
“Sorry, sir,” the man hunched in on himself. “The first signal was their automated beacon. That’s the first time I’ve managed to get a voice.”
“Tell me you’ve got a line,” Gareth raged in helpless futility.
“Almost,” Ferrie muttered. “Almost. There. Got it.”
Quickly, the man scribbled a set of coordinates on a notepad, tore it off, and handed it to Gareth.
“Pilot,” Gareth stepped close to Atkins. “Come left two, up one, and prepare to reverse thrusters full on my command.”
“Aye, aye, commander,” Atkins said. “Left two, up one, full stop on your command.”
“Execute, pilot,” Gareth ordered, making sure he was braced hard with a hand on the bulkhead.
Bellerophon groaned with the strain of the engines suddenly backing as hard as they could. The little patrol cutter wouldn’t stop on a dime, not as this speed, but she was really giving it her all.
“Radioman, where are they?” Gareth yelled over the roaring engines.
“There, sir,” Ferrie stood and pointed out the window.
Gareth followed the hand and saw it. A ship, landed or crashed on the surface of a large asteroid, almost a moon in its own right, lacking only a planet to orbit.
The ship was larger than Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, but without all the sleek speed and grace of the Sky Patrol vessel. No, it was a boxy-looking thing, an awkward duck meant to trundle along the space lanes with a heavy load. It rested on the gray surface of the little moon like a fly waiting to be swatted. Perhaps it already had. There had been an emergency distress beacon.
Gareth opened a radio.
“Distressed vessel, this is Sky Patrol Deputy Agent Gareth St. John Dankworth, aboard the Patrol Cutter Bellerophon,” he said calmly, not wanting to scare the poor girl any more out of her wits than she already was. “What is your emergency?”
“Oh, thank all the gods,” she replied. “There’s been a landslide. My father’s trapped under the rockfall and the ship has been damaged. Please hurry!”
“The Sky Patrol is on its way, miss,” he replied firmly, cutting the line.
“Atkins, take us in,” Gareth ordered, reaching to flip the PA system live. “Put us down close, but not too close. Duewall, Vitro, Hlavka, get suited up to join me on the surface. Chief, you’re in charge until I get back.”
A chorus of assents echoed through the narrow confines of the ship.
Gareth turned and raced aft to the airlock. There, he found three men, already locking their fishbowl helmets into place to leave the vessel: Spacer First Class Eddy Duewall; Spacer Second Class ‘Doc’ Vitro; and Landsman Matt Hlavka, a new rookie with a promising career ahead of him.
Unlike an officer of Sky Patrol, these men wore short boots in black leather, laced up the front. Gray pants flared outward a little at the knee like a bell covering their feet. Their collarless, pullover tunics in maroon at least matched his for color, and they had left their kepis with the ship, the short brim of the cap even then too much for their fishbowls. Each man wore his rank on his neckerchief: Duewall’s solid red; Vitro’s solid white, and Hvalka’s solid black; so Gareth could at least tell them apart from behind.
All uniforms being ready to transform to surface suits, Gareth was immediately ready as he reached for a helmet to don. Tall, black leather boots, polished to a shine. White pants tucked into the boots, cut in a style he had heard more than one female refer to as hotpants. Across his broad shoulders, the standing-collar, maroon tunic of the Sky Patrol, with the black and gold SP logo on the bib front between the gold buttons, wrapped in the single, white ring of an Deputy Agent. At his waist, a black, leather, Sam Brown belt, with the SP logo worked into the buckle.
Because they were leaving the ship, Gareth opened the arms locker and added a holster and a Ionic Stunner pistol to his gear after his helmet clicked into place. The Sonic Stunner version of the pistol was as much the symbol of Sky Patrol as his badge, but it only worked in an atmosphere. Gareth turned once to make sure all his men were ready, getting firm nods in reply.
“Bellerophon, this is Dankworth,” he said over the radio. “We’re all set here. Go ahead and activate the airlock.”
Behind them, a bank vault door swung shut with a loud beeping before it clanged into place and a wheel spun to set the bolts. Air hissed out of the room around them, until Gareth felt his uniform tighten just a little. A light began to blink, and the outer airlock door swung in.
Gareth took the lead, loping across the gap between the ships, careful not to jump too hard in the light gravity.
“Sir!?!” a voice came over the comm.
Gareth paused and looked back
Landsman Hlavka had jumped too high, confused by being on the surface of a sphere and thinking they were under a higher gravity. He was perilously close to floating off into space.
Gareth thought quickly. It would take too long to send the ship after him, and time was critical, so Gareth gauged the distance carefully and leapt, aiming to pass beneath the man.
“Steady, Hlavka,” Gareth ordered, flying towards him. “I’ve got you.”
Rather than risk a collision, Gareth grabbed an ankle as he went by, tugging hard. Unlike the Landsman, the Deputy Agent had plenty of experience with low-gravity situations. Their combined mass slowed him down and pulled them to the surface, where the rookie landed hard, and Dankworth came down in a classic three-point stance.
“Oh, thank you, commander,” Hlavka cried.
“Just pay attention, Landsman,” Gareth replied breezily, clapping the man on the shoulder. “We’ll make a sailor out of you yet.”
Gareth turned to assess the situation. The other two men had made it to the ship and were waiting for him. With the rookie in tow, Gareth joined them.
Before he could trigger the radio, the door to the bulky freighter’s airlock swung inward, revealing a young woman in a clingy spacesuit.
Gareth tried not to react, but seeing a woman in pants instead of a skirt was a touch unnerving, even as he understood the necessity of it. Still, it was awkward, being able to trace the line of those firm thighs up to a petite bottom and a narrow waist.
He tried to focus on her face, but that promised almost as much trouble.
She was gorgeous.
Young. Maybe only twenty years old, although it was hard to tell.
Black hair in short ringlets framed a heart-shaped face that might have been cast in porcelain. Bright blue eyes and dark red lips. Gareth was glad they both wore helmets, so he wasn’t tempted to simply kiss her.
“I’m Deputy Agent Gareth St. John Dankworth, of the Earth Force Sky Patrol,” he announced over the radio. “How can we help?”
“My name is Paulette,” she replied in an emotional voice that Gareth couldn’t help but compare to a morning songbird. “Paulette MacCormaic. My father is trapped and the ship is stuck. You must help us.”
“That’s why we’re here, ma’am,” he said. “Show us where your father is.”
“This way,” she began to walk around the bow of the ugly ship, Gareth and the others in her wake.
On the internal radio, Gareth heard a low wolf whistle. He stopped and turned to his men with a thunderous scowl.
“Sorry, sir,” Eddie Duewall replied sheepishly. “Won’t happen again.”
“If it does, you’re going on report, Spacer,” Gareth warned him.
Authority and probity re-established, Gareth turned again and walked after the young lady. It was difficult to concentrate, as he kept being mesmerized by the shapely bottom in those clinging pants. He wanted to wolf whistle as well, but kept it to himself.
One of these days, he would be promoted to Field Agent, and he could finally ask Philippa to marry him, back on Earth. They had both worked so hard to keep themselves pure. Surely, it wouldn’t be too long before his Earth Force commanders recognized all his hard work and promoted him.
Until then, he tried to swallow past a dry throat with a lump in it as the beautiful, young woman sashayed ahead of him.
“There he is,” she stopped suddenly and pointed.
Gareth moved forward far enough that he could concentrate on something other than the beautiful woman plaguing him with awkward, lustful thoughts.
Sure enough, a rockslide had ripped past the area, moving right to left. Part of it was pressed firmly against the side of the young woman’s ship. Over across the debris field, he could see a man, flat on the ground and half-covered with rocks and scree.
“With me, men,” Gareth ordered.
Rather than risk the unsteady surface, he took two steps and leapt far and flat across the surface of the asteroid, almost flying as his powerful thighs drove him like a diver off a cliff face.
He landed perfectly, just a few feet from the trapped man, and turned towards him.
Through the man’s clear helmet, it was obvious he was the father of the beautiful woman waiting safely for them to return. The same black hair, much of it gray now. The same bones in the face framing intense, cerulean eyes.
“Thank God you’ve come,” the man said.
“What happened?” Gareth asked.
Close by, his men were just now stumbling their way towards them across the rocks.
“My name is Doctor Ewan MacCormaic. I was looking for a good spot to set up my new mining invention,” the man said, obviously in some pain from the tone of his voice. “Something happened and the slope of the hill suddenly gave way. I’m not hurt, as near as I can tell, but my right foot is trapped by something under the gravel and I can’t move.”
“Very good, sir,” Gareth said firmly. “Sky Patrol’s here now. We’ll take care of it.”
He looked around, spotting what he needed leaned up against the side of the man’s ship.
“Duewall, grab that shovel,” he ordered. “Hlavka, help me dig. Doc, you get ready in case we need to treat an injury when we get him out.”
Gareth plunged his hand into the loose stone and swept a handful to one side with his mighty muscles. The Landsman did the same, but lacked the strength to move much at a time. Instead, the younger man put his head down and concentrated.
Quickly, the small rocks were cleared, and Gareth began encountering larger rocks, almost like dragon eggs from some fantasy novel. Even in low gravity, they were heavy, but Gareth was equal to the challenge, grabbing a large one in both hands and staggering to his feet. He shot-put the rock safely off to one side as the other two men kept at it.
Within minutes, they had the older man dug out from the rubble, but he had been right. A huge rock had come down. Had it landed a little to the left, it probably would have crushed the man’s leg, possibly severing it until he bled out, trapped in vacuum, but for now, it was better than a manacle for keeping him in place.
“A shovel’s not going to be any good against that,” Gareth said aloud, looking at the trapped man. “Even in this gravity. What kind of mining invention were you going to test? Anything we could use?”
“If it was assembled, yes,” the man said sadly. “But we had just landed, and the device is still in pieces in the hold of the ship.”
“Too bad,” Gareth said. “What was it?”
“A short-range, optical laser,” Doctor MacCormaic said. “You put it up against your cutting face and turn it on. It combines a mass spectrometer with a short beam focus, so you can tell what rocks you are vaporizing as it cuts cone-shaped plugs from the stone, letting you track a seam of valuable materials more closely.”
“That would be very useful, sir,” Gareth said. “And it gives me an idea. Landsman Hlavka, you got back to the ship and get my Lasrifle from my cabin. We’ll have to cut him loose.”
“Me, sir?” the man was nervous.
“We’re in a hurry here, Hlavka,” Gareth reassured him. “Everyone will swear that I did it, so you won’t have to fill out any paperwork for being in possession of a lethal weapon.”
“Oh,” the spacer said, relieved. “Thank you, sir.”
With that, he was off, stumbling carefully across the rough surface of the moon, back to Bellerophon.
“Thank you for saving my father.”
The girl was suddenly right there, standing so close Gareth swore he could smell her perfume, even through two space suits and stellar vacuum.
Gareth rose.
“Not yet, miss,” he said. “But we’ll be there shortly. He’ll be safe with us.”
He wanted to take her in his arms and press her against his chest. Taste those lips. Ruffle that onyx-black hair with his fingers.
From the look in her eyes, the same improper thoughts appeared to race through her mind as well.
Gareth concentrated on the man trapped by the rockfall.
“A laser is a very dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, sir,” Gareth said, squatting down to get the girl out of his line of sight.
“I’m aware of that, young man,” the doctor replied primly. “But I’m a researcher with Yamazaki Heavy Industries. Part of the Technology Division of your Earth Force Sky Patrol. Most asteroids are just nickel and iron. It’s not worth even trying to grind them up wholesale. I’m trying to invent a device that a single man can use when he lands on a larger rock, or a moon, and just go after the exotic materials. The platinum group, for instance, or the so-called Rare Earths that we need to maintain a technological society. Earth is running out of such materials, trying to colonize the entire solar system, so something must be done.”
“Well if you’re with Yamazaki, you’ve got the kind of brains the job will need, sir,” Gareth said, spying Hlavka returning, holding the Lasrifle like it was a bomb in his hands.
Gareth stood and took the weapon.
“Good work, sailor,” he said, checking the settings.
The rock trapping the boffin’s leg was nearly a foot thick at the narrowest part. He would have to be careful when making his cut, not to release the entire mass in such a way that he shifted the stone and dropped it on the man.
And the Lasrifle was a dangerous weapon. As an officer with Sky Patrol, Gareth was the only one here certified to handle it in the field. Everyone else could make do with their Stunners. After all, it wasn’t like the Dark Ages of early space flight, where all the nations of the world had maintained armies and threatened each other with deadly force.
Today, everyone had to work together for the good of mankind, whether it was in the Balloon Cities of Venus, the Hives of UnderMars, or the Gas Miners of Jupiter and Saturn, to say nothing of the Comet Wildcatters, seeking their fortunes in deep-system water mines. No, Earth Force Sky Patrol kept the peace these days, and did it with authority and justice, rather than force. It made the Solar System a better place.
Gareth opened the butt of his Lasrifle to reveal the controls and made some adjustments. Cutting heat was more important than range or pulsing damage at a target.
“Everybody stand back a safe distance,” he ordered brusquely, taking aim with the chrome and wood weapon.
He steadied himself with a deep breath and pulled the trigger. A beam of ruby light flashed out and struck the stone, above and to the right of the trapped scientist. Rock flashed red hot and then puffed to smoke as it vaporized under the terrible, destructive eye of that beam, a modern Balor striking down the De Daanan sailors below.
Down and in a little for the next few shots, a slow-motion woodpecker digging in a petrified tree for lunch. It felt good.
Suddenly, the rock cracked. The mass began to shift forward, intent on crushing the scientist.
Gareth dropped the Lasrifle and sprang forward, driving his strength into the stone and lifting with all his immense might.
“You men, grab the doctor and pull him out,” Gareth ordered loudly. “Do it now.”
He couldn’t hold the mass back for long, but enough of the stone should be cut away for them to break the rest.
Feet appeared at the edge of his vision, but Gareth was entirely focused on the stone, holding it back like a tide trying to come in. He didn’t need long, but he absolutely had to keep it back.
“Ugh, he’s stuck,” someone yelled.
“Pull harder,” Gareth replied. “You’ve only got seconds.”
Under him, he could feel the angry weight try to elude his will. To complete its slide and take the life of the inventor.
He would not allow it!
“Got it,” Duewall said suddenly. “Sir, he’s clear.”
“Everybody, back safely away. Immediately,” Gareth ordered.
He would only get one chance to do this, and needed a clear field. He glanced right, left.
Open space, with his three men over by the ship, two of them holding the man up while the medic inspected the trapped leg. Beautiful Paulette waited close by, hands clenching and unclenching.
Gareth took a deep breath, shifted his feet as much as he could, and leapt as hard as he could, up and backwards, using all the powerful muscles in his well-trained body.
Success.
He flew clear as the rest of the avalanche snapped greedily at his toes, but he was away.
Maneuvering, Gareth landed lightly atop the hull of the MacCormaic freighter, holding on to a radio post to keep his balance.
“You did it!” Paulette cried as he leapt lightly down to land beside her.
The young woman threw herself into his arms, pressing her entire body as flat as possible against his chest in ways that made Gareth uncomfortable.
“How can I ever thank you?” she asked, looking up at him.
But for helmets in the way, he would have considered stealing a kiss and then putting himself on report. Fortunately, technology saved him.
“All in the line of duty, miss,” he replied, untangling himself, as detestable as he found the notion, and stepping back so he could inspect her father.
Images of Philippa Loughty haunted him as he did so, his Little Lady of the Lake, waiting oh-so-patiently for him to return to her, but he crushed those desires, all the wistful dreams, beneath his duty.
“My hero,” Paulette swooned.
Her voice didn’t help his calm.
“Doc, how is he?” Gareth asked, focusing himself on duty, and nothing else. Desires could wait.
“Bruised and banged up,” Spacer Third Class Medic Vitro replied. “But nothing is broken. I recommend rest for a few days.”
“And the ship?” Gareth asked.
“The ship is fine,” Doctor MacCormaic replied. “Paulette doesn’t know how to pilot it, but I can back it out of the slide with no problems.”
Well, of course. Who would train a woman to fly a spaceship? They were far to dainty and demure for that sort of rugged existence. Leave that to menfolk.
“In that case, our work is done here,” Gareth announced, bowing to the two civilians. “Doctor, Miss, we’ll be on our way.”
“Thank you so much for saving us,” Paulette crooned heartfully, almost taking a bite out of Gareth’s soul. “Will we ever see you again?”
“We’re the Earth Force Sky Patrol, miss,” Gareth said, fists on hips and head thrown proudly back. “We’ll always be there when you need help.”
“My hero,” she said.
“Well, yes,” he said awkwardly. “Back to the ship, men. There are patrol rounds to finish.”
The men fell in, happily repeating the story. It would look good on his report. Hopefully, another gold star that would get him promoted from Deputy to Auxiliary Agent.
But first, he really needed a cold shower.
Tin Can Pirates An Earth Force Sky Patrol File: Solar Year 2383
“Mayday, mayday,” a ragged, tired voice emerged from the speakers on the bridge of Patrol Cutter Bellerophon. “Please respond. Life support is giving out and I don’t have much time left.”
“Track that signal, radioman,” Gareth St. John Dankworth barked the order at his bridge crew. As an Auxiliary Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, he was the only commissioned officer aboard, the rest being enlisted men. He was responsible for all of their lives.
Gareth stood up from his station on the compact bridge and keyed the overhead address system.
“All hands, stand by for maximum maneuvering,” Gareth ordered. “Chief, bring the reactor to full power and be prepared to push it hard.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the call came back.
“Mayday repeating,” that lonely voice called again. “Please respond. Warning. My claim was hit by pirates. Protect yourselves…”
Gareth lurked over the radioman, watching the man furiously spinning knobs and watching gauges.
“What happened, Ferrie?” Gareth demanded.
“Lost his signal, sir,” the Spacer Two replied. “Got a partial vector, but it’s like he just stopped transmitting.”
“Give me the new course,” Gareth said, keying the ship-wide again. “All hands, brace for acceleration.”
Ferrie tore off a piece of paper from his pad and handed it to Gareth. As commander of Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, Gareth took two steps to the big man standing at the ship’s wheel. You had to have muscles to spin the wheel while simultaneously pulling and turning it on the post. Tom Atkins was always equal to the job, nearly as big and strong as Gareth.
“Come about Atkins.” Gareth read the numbers. “New heading right three points, up five. Lock that in and pour on the juice.”
“Right three up five,” Atkins echoed. “Stand by. Ready for acceleration.”
“Hit it, mister,” Gareth said.
Aft, the full power of the Choueiri Arcjet Ionic Drive lit, a blue-white, electrical fire driving the sleek greyhound of Sky Patrol across the dark depths of the asteroid belt.
“Radioman,” Gareth called without looking at Ferrie. “Keep your eye on your scanners. There will be rocks ahead of us.”
“Commander?” Chief Edevane called from the reactor room. “At this speed, should we spin the shields forward instead?”
“Good idea, Chief,” Gareth replied. “Bring them to zero, zero, zero.”
“Coming up, Gareth,” the Chief said.
The Star Shields. A five-yard thick concrete barrier you kept between you and the Sun at all times, just to reduce the solar radiation the ship absorbed. They had solar panels on them to supplement the reactor, and the ship was still exposed to the cosmic background radiation, but every little bit helped.
At this speed, having a concrete shield in front might protect them from ramming a small asteroid at speeds too great to maneuver safely.
As the Star Shield came around, the big picture window across the bridge was occulted. Atkins and Ferrie would be flying on instruments and scanners, rather than good, old-fashioned eyeballs, but Gareth couldn’t imagine two men better for the task.
“Commander, I’ve got a new signal,” Ferrie said. “Two of them, as a matter of fact. One stable on the surface of that asteroid there. The other seems to be receding.”
Receding? Why would it be receding? Of course, his ship had gotten here before the pirates could flee.
But those folks were running now. Just as the Law was arriving, like in any good western vid.
Gareth ground his teeth, but he really had no choice now but to let them go.
“Ferrie, lock everything you have on the second signal and track them as long and far as you can,” Gareth ordered. “All hands, prepare for full reverse acceleration. Atkins, bring us to rest with the asteroid and land us as close as you can to the signal.”
Bellerophon had a gun on the bow. She was a patrol cutter, after all. But Gareth’s duty was to rescue the vessel’s crew, assuming they could. Only after that, or if the man was dead when they arrived, could the posse set off in pursuit.
Simple orbital geometry and physics worked against him now. They were going faster than the supposed pirate, and could run him down if they turned. But every minute might be one too long for a man injured and perhaps dying down there.
Justice never slept, however. Earth Force Sky Patrol would never rest. Right now, he was just spotting the pirates a head start, that was all.
The second signal receded as the ship slowly settled on the surface, but remained on Ferrie’s screen.
You can run from me. You cannot hide.
“Duewall, Vitro, Hlavka, get suited up to join me on the surface. Chief, you’ll be in charge until I get back,” Gareth ordered, moving aft to the main airlock.
The three men were his usual team for missions on the ground, so they had anticipated him. All were already in their fishbowl helmets in the airlock when he arrived.
Unlike an officer of Sky Patrol, in his tall boots, white hotpants, and maroon tunic, these men wore short boots in black leather, laced up the front. Gray pants flared outward a little at the knee like mushrooms covering their feet. Their collarless, pullover tunics in maroon at least matched his for color, and they had left their kepis with the ship, the short brim of the cap even then too much for their fishbowls. Each man wore his rank on his neckerchief: Duewall’s solid red; Vitro’s solid white, and Hvalka’s solid black; so Gareth could at least tell them apart from behind.
Gareth had stopped by his cabin and grabbed the Lasrifle from that locker as he headed aft. Better to be overarmed than under. Once he got to the airlock, he used his thumbprint to open the arms locker and hand each man an Ionic Stunner and a stick-on holder for their thighs.
He locked the fishbowl over his head and opened the radio.
“Bellerophon, this is Dankworth,” he said loudly. “We’re all set here. Go ahead and activate the airlock.”
Behind them, a bank vault door swung shut with a loud beeping before it clanged into place and a wheel spun to set the bolts. Air hissed out of the room around them, until Gareth felt his uniform tighten just a little. A light began to blink, and the outer airlock door swung in.
Asteroid mining was frequently a lonely, obsessive task. Most of the true rocks were almost completely nickel and iron. Huge mega-conglomerates could grab those with robot ships and feed them into enormous hoppers that reduced them to stacks of bars and ingots.
Small-scale miners had to prospect in places the big guys didn’t bother, with their spectrometers and gear, looking for the exotic metals, up in the platinum group, for example, or the rare earths, for the things Earth’s economy needed to continue to grow. Here, you dug for a while, then moved on, hoping to find a vein of the pure stuff left over from the ancient supernovae that had seeded this solar system.
Every once in a while, a man might find a stone as big as a patrol cutter that was nearly a pure nugget. If he could keep it secret and register and protect his claim, his grandchildren might still be fabulously wealthy.
Assuming no pirates came along and robbed you.
The hatch opened and Gareth let his Earth muscles drive him across the surface of the small moonlet like a swimmer in the low gravity. Behind him, the other three followed as well as they could, but none of them had his skill or power.
Ahead, a steel and composite box, longer than it was tall or wide. Blunt at one end and flared for drives at the other.
Gareth spied a figure in a mining armor splayed to one side, as though he had been trying to crawl back to the ship when he collapsed. Or died.
Gareth homed in on the figure.
“Vitro,” he called. “I’ve got a man down here. Move it.”
Rather than speak, the medic surged ahead of his companions for a second before they caught up.
Gareth was there and had the man turned over. When he did, he could see the air and drops of blood seeping out of a series of blaster marks on the surface of the armored suit. At least the man had stood facing them when they shot him.
Quickly, Gareth pulled emergency patches from a pocket of his suit and began slapping them in place on the leaking holes. Mining armor usually had weeks of air and a solid air scrubber aboard, as you might just live in the suit for several days, rather than lock through to the interior of your ship.
Gareth felt the medic slide in alongside him and start pressing buttons of the side of the man’s helmet.
“I’ve got lifesigns still, sir,” the medic said. “Weak, but present. Looks like we got here in the nick of time.”
“We’ll need to get him out of the armor, Spacer,” Gareth said. “His ship or ours?”
“I trust my equipment better than some random stranger, sir,” Vitro said. “But mining armor’s too heavy to lift, unless we get a mover or something out of his ship, maybe.”
“There’s no time for that,” Gareth decided. “Will he survive if we move him?”
“Can’t tell without getting him open, sir,” the medic shrugged. “But those are heat burns, so they might have cauterized inside. Probably worth risking.”
“Good enough,” Gareth said. “I’ll carry him on my back. Duewall and Hlavka, you each stabilize a hip. Doc, you get to the ship now and get your medbay ready.”
Gareth slipped an arm around the armored figure and lifted. Even in the low gravity of this moonlet, there was a lot of mass. But Gareth was not deterred. He grabbed and thrust upward with his hips and thighs, getting the figure more or less standing as the other two Spacers gripped arms and held him.
Gareth turned and backed into the armor to piggy-back him.
Over the radio, low moans suddenly sounded, so the man was awake. Probably mindless with pain, but there was nothing any of them could do until they got him out of his armor.
Gareth reached back awkwardly as Duewall and Hlavka draped the arms over his shoulders. He stood up to his full height, which thankfully was enough to clear the shorter man’s feet. It was too much to leap there in a few bounds, so Gareth focused on keeping his balance forward, even as his men helped him. In the distance Vitro was entering the airlock, so he’d be ready when they got there.
That amount of mass made him feel like Atlas lifting up the world, but Gareth would not be defeated. They would get the miner to safety and do everything they could to make sure the man survived.
They were Earth Force Sky Patrol. They would always protect the innocent first.
And then punish the guilty.
Gareth looked up from his paperwork as Vitro entered. The medic looked like he’d been drug backwards through a knothole.
“How is he?” Gareth asked.
“Badly wounded, but I think he’ll make it, sir,” Vitro sighed. “Another ten minutes or so and it would be a different story. Problem is, he needs a proper hospital. I’ve done the best I can, but mostly that’s to stabilize him until real doctors can open him up and fix things.”
“Very good, Vitro,” Gareth said, standing. “He’s your primary duty until then.”
“Yes, sir,” the medic departed.
Gareth let his thoughts crystalize for a moment, and then came to his decision.
From his office he went forward to the bridge. Spacer Three Mohammed bin Aziz al-Bukhara had the ship’s wheel for now, with Atkins resting. Omar Ferrie should have gone off duty at the radio station, but had refused all orders, sure that the faint signal he still held would be lost if someone else tried.
Gareth couldn’t really argue with the man, so he opened the ship-wide comm and took a deep breath.
“Chief Edevane and Spacer One Atkins to the bridge,” he called. “All hands stand by for maneuvering orders.”
Quickly, the two named men appeared on the tiny bridge.
“What’s up, commander” Edevane asked as they arrived.
“We have a problem,” Gareth said. “The injured man needs to get to a base hospital if he’s to have any chance to survive, but our faint trace on the pirates will vanish if we do.”
Both men nodded. Most of the crew knew the score on that one. And to a man it probably galled them nearly as much as it did Gareth. They were Sky Patrol. They were supposed to be the good guys, but sometimes the good guys were stuck.
“Chief, there’s only one way to handle this,” Gareth said. “I’m going to board the miner’s vessel and stay in pursuit. You’ll get this ship back to base and then round up help to come after me.”
“Sir, are you sure that’s wise?” Atkins blurted out.
“No, Tommy,” Gareth replied. “It’s probably stupid, but it’s the only chance we have to capture those men before someone else becomes the next victim.”
“As you order, sir,” the Chief said with a quiet, stark voice.
As senior enlisted man aboard, he was used to being in temporary command while Gareth was off ship, perhaps on the surface of an asteroid as before. Now, he would have to be responsible for everyone and everything until he could get the little ship and crew to Asteroid Base Three and the Commandant.
“Atkins, I need you driving for a bit,” Gareth said. “You’ll need to put us right next to the miner’s ship so I can move some gear over in short trips. After that, you and al-Bukhara will have to hard burn home as fast as you can. Questions?”
“Negative, sir,” they both said in unison.
In a moment, the ship was a flurry of activity. Gareth left the Chief forward and went aft to locate the miner’s badly-damaged armor. It would be key to the next phase of the plan he had considered.
Outside, Atkins used his deft touch to drop Bellerophon almost close enough to the other ship to simply toss things by hand between airlocks. Gareth suited up and he and Hlavka hauled the armor over, as well as several other things Gareth would need.
Finally, he moved to the bridge. Thankfully, the ship was designed to be easy to fly, even in the armor suit. Some men evacuated the ship of all air for weeks at a time, just boarding to move to a new location, but not bothering with anything else.
Asteroid miners were some of the roughest, toughest men in the Solar System. Only comet wildcatters, mining for water on the fragile snowballs of space, could give them a close run for the money.
And Earth Force Sky Patrol, of course.
“Radioman Ferrie,” Gareth opened the radio between ships. “Confirm the last course laid in.”
“Roger that, commander,” Omar said quickly. “They did a dogleg burn about three hours ago. Probably felt they were safe enough. Anybody but me might have lost them before that.”
Gareth smiled. Not much brought Omar Ferrie joy besides outsmarting other people with his radio gear. There wasn’t a better radioman in Sky Patrol, as far as Gareth was concerned.
“Very good,” Gareth concluded. “Chief, you are now in command until relieved. I’ll be expecting the cavalry soon.”
“We’ll be there, Gareth,” the old man of the ship said.
On his internal screens, Gareth watched the slender dragonfly of a ship hop delicately into the air and turn for home. They would probably break every speed record known in the process of getting there.
Gareth spent a little time, just making sure everything was clear in his head as he pressurized his new ship and got ready. Then he lifted off and programmed in a course, based on the mathematical wizardry of his Radioman.
All of space travel was just Newtonian geometry, with a little Einstein thrown in to give it extra flavor. So many seconds burn on a particular course for acceleration, and then you coasted for the most part until turnover. Sometimes, you could get lucky and slingshot your way around some planet or moon for a gravity assist. It was just like playing snooker back home, except that this table wasn’t flat.
Still, he had them. Justice might be delayed, but it would not be denied. Gareth programmed in the course and watched it for a bit, just to make sure everything worked.
Then he went aft and began to prepare a little surprise for his pirate friends.
Gareth somehow knew the exact moment when the pirates detected him. A space cop develops that sixth sense, even across astronomical distances.
Based on the first burn away, and then the dogleg the ship had taken, Radioman Ferrie had estimated one of three larger asteroids that must be where the pirates had their hidden base. Briefly, Gareth had considered chasing them directly, cutting the chord of the ring of asteroids, but he wanted to truly surprise these men.
And all spacers are superstitious folk. They would recognize the ship chasing them, especially when it took almost the same course they did. Ferrie’s course had him maneuvering around a few larger rocks, but nothing terrible.
In bad vids, asteroid belts are always shown with large and small rocks so close together that slips have to maneuver crazily to avoid collisions. It was like the director took a vehicle chase on the surface of a planet, and just projected it into three dimensions with rocks substituting for parked cars and trees.
And sure, there were lots of rocks out here, but space was huge. Big rocks were almost alone in the depths of space. As long as you flew slow enough, the little ones wound usually bounce right off your hull, and you can dodge the small moonlets.
So Gareth had taken the same, seven hour burn as the pirates had. Then the dogleg down and left. It wasn’t a crowded section of the asteroid belt, but perhaps less well-known. More dangerous. A shade denser, as two large asteroids had managed to graze each other in the last few thousand years and spalled off chunks of each other.
Now was when things got a little risky, but it couldn’t be helped.
Gareth had spent his time repairing the miner’s battle-damaged armor from the inside so it no longer leaked air. He left the outside scorched and gruesomely covered with flash-dried blood.
The man who had worn it wasn’t all that much shorter than Gareth, as these men tended to be big and burly, so the armor fit him a bit uncomfortably, but he didn’t need to wear it long.
The mining ship itself had been vented back to space, like before. After that Gareth had programmed it to slave its movement to any other ship that came close. He had even run a private comm wire from the bridge down to the cargo bay through some ducting, and plugged it into the back of the armor, hidden as long as he stayed leaned back.
Someone walking close should think that the armor was hung on the normal rack, but Gareth was standing exactly next to the rack, in front of a non-existent set of hooks.
He could watch.
On the scanners, his ship had autonomously gone into turnover as it approached the three moonlets, slowing at a reasonable, measured pace that wasn’t a threat to anyone.
Still, someone had noticed. A ship had lifted from the surface of the second moon, right where Ferrie had guessed from his math. Gareth’s ship came to a stop as it detected the other, and waited.
They waited.
Gareth smiled, hidden down on the cargo deck and watching a feed from the bridge sensors.
The pirate pinged them hard, but the miner seemingly ignored the other vessel.
It started to come a little closer, no doubt with their own, highly-illegal bow gun pointed at the intruder, ready to blast first and then run.
But the new vessel didn’t react. Didn’t run. Didn’t chase.
Just sat there, dead in space.
Could it have followed them here?
“Miner XJ-9641Q, what do you want?” an angry man called over the comm.
Gareth didn’t bother replying.
Superstitious.
They knew who was chasing them. They had just shot the captain and killed him twelve hours ago, as far as they knew. Sky Patrol had been close enough to respond, but had gone to rescue the man, and let the them escape.
And this wasn’t Bellerophon in pursuit.
A second ping, this one omnidirectional as they looked for Gareth’s ship, maybe somehow hidden and lurking in the darkness.
Nothing.
“Miner XJ-9641Q, respond,” the voice was harder now. Meaner.
Nothing. The ship was just programmed to wait now. If they got closer, it would let them. If it fled, it would begin to follow, but not at full speed.
Just enough that an Auxiliary Agent of Sky Patrol could keep them on his scanners when they did.
Time passed.
The pirates waited.
Gareth expected that they were preparing to run, but stuck by the strange behavior of the ship that had followed them.
Someone would say it. All spacers were superstitious to some degree. Pirates were usually worse.
Was it haunted?
Gareth grinned and waited. He had covered the inside of his faceplate with a thin, black gauze. Not enough to limit his vision, but it would make his suit seem dark and empty when he moved.
And he would.
But he had to wait.
Eventually, greed or curiosity got the better of them. The pirate maneuvered closer, running a curve to one side, where they could see the open bays of the ship. Their sensors would pick up no pressurization anywhere on the bridge. And Gareth had left the windows uncovered, so they could even look in and see nobody on the bridge.
Ghost ship.
Would they run at that point?
This was the hardest part. He could only guess at their behavior, based on probabilities. That, and human psychology.
An empty ship was worth money if they could fence it somewhere. And Sky Patrol probably hadn’t had time to set a trap.
Probably.
Gareth smiled and waited.
Eventually, greed overcame them, as he had expected it would.
The pirate ship came closer.
She wasn’t a sleek, purpose-built warship like Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, but she also wasn’t an efficient box with engines, like the miner. Somewhere in between, with space for cargo as well as a pirate crew. Gareth suspected he might be facing two dozen men, all told, but many of those would have to remain on the other ship.
He would have to face a dozen men, at most. Possibly less, since no captain would risk too many men in what might be a trap.
Gareth set his radio to listening for nearby transmissions.
He got lucky enough to actually see through the open cargo bay doors as the pirate ship navigated close, just out of the corner of his faceplate if he leaned forward. They came to rest a few hundred yards away and waited.
Another hard ping lit up the miner’s scanners.
Nothing.
Nobody.
Except perhaps ghosts?
Gareth smiled and waited.
Time was in his favor now. Bellerophon would be racing as hard as they could burn to headquarters, possibly using a tight-beam laser to tell the Commandant what was going on.
Then again, maybe not, as his men would want to be the ones leading the charge to rescue their commander. Every minute the pirates sat confused just made it that much more likely that the cavalry would come riding over the hill with trumpets blaring at some point.
Another ping. Hard and focused this time. Someone looking for anybody moving around. Any clue what was going on.
Something other than an angry ghost stalking them for the many crimes they had committed.
On the bridge feed, Gareth was able to pick up a half-dozen signals as pirates emerged from the other ship. Their suits were mostly functional, when they flew into visual range of one of the cameras he had left on, rather than the heavy-duty, powered mining exoskeleton Gareth wore. They were sealed tight and had some modicum of protection against sharp edges and such, but not anything like Sky Force Assault suits.
He considered pitying them for a moment, but these men were pirates. They had left a man shot and bleeding out, only fleeing when Sky Patrol arrived to chase them off. He didn’t have a yardarm handy, so he’d just have to make do.
Six men crossed the space between ships. This vessel was tumbling ever so slightly, relative to the pirate. Not much, just enough to show different faces over time.
Ghost ship, right? No living crew would let a vessel roll on their gyros without at least compensating, even if it was too slight to notice, except for the pilot.
The hull clanged as the first pirate landed with his boot magnets, hard enough that the vibrations passed through the steel at Gareth’s back as a sound, contained within his tiny world.
More thumps.
The internal cameras were on, but the feed was controlled inside Gareth’s suit, same as the ship’s scanners. He watched six men with beam pistols cautiously make their way into the cargo bay, trying to look all directions at once.
A zero-gravity instructor had once thwapped the side of Gareth’s helmet with a cane when he automatically locked himself onto the deck during an exercise, even as the man was hanging from a side wall.
There is no down in space.
Gareth was locked to the deck himself, but only because the armor needed to look normal.
Each of the pirates made the same mistake now, setting themselves on the same plane of motion with the ship, like they were under gravity. It would make the next steps easier.
Gareth nearly laughed when the pirates came around a corner and saw his armor, covered with blast marks and dried blood. On the radio channel they were using, he heard the scream and cries of surprise. His risk now was that they might shoot on general principle. But armor was expensive stuff, not to be unnecessarily wasted.
“But we killed him,” one of the men said shakily.
Someone flashed a light at the faceplate of Gareth’s armor from across the bay, but it would show black with all the inside lights off and gauze across the glass.
“He must have gotten out of the armor and found the medbay,” another voice said. Probably the man in charge of the boarders. “Find him.”
The group tromped into the bay, with a pair heading aft to the engineering spaces and four going forward. The space was small, but Gareth had locked each door and they would have to open them with the mechanical override to get inside.
Finally, they got the first hatch open and the man in charge tapped one on the shoulder.
“Wait here and keep watch,” the man ordered.
The pirate nodded and stood to one side, watching the hallway forward as the other three went into the crew area, sneaking carefully looking for a ghost.
Gareth leaned his head forward and the two aft were out of sight. It was just him and the one pirate.
He didn’t like pirates.
In atmosphere, a miner suit makes noise. They were all in vacuum now.
Slowly, Gareth reached down for the weapon he had concealed in an outside pocket of the armor, and pulled out his Lasrifle, modified by removing the stock to become a long-barreled pistol.
It was unsporting, but he was one cop against six pirates, and a dead man if they made any sound. Gareth shot the man, the beam going clean through the helmet bubble of his suit, cracking the ferro-glass as it did, and killing the pirate instantly.
The man died without a sound. Without any clue what had killed him, most likely.
Gareth slid the pistol down by his side, mostly out of sight but still in his hand.
He waited.
“Rudy, check in,” a voice said.
That must be the dead man attached to the deck by only one foot, as his death thrashing had knocked the other loose.
A good captain would have had life sensors constantly transmitting, so they knew when a man got into trouble. Here, a pirate had died and nobody even noticed.
“Johansson. Mills. Find Rudy,” that stern voice from before said. “Wake the bastard up with a few kicks if you have to.”
Those must be the two aft. The man hunting ghosts or ambushes forward certainly wouldn’t want to be alone. Not on a ghost ship.
Gareth waited.
Sure enough, the two emerged from the rear, clomping noisily along the metal of the deck rather than flying gracefully, like he would have done.
“Rudy, wake up,” one of them said.
The man was too dead to say anything, and his wounds would have largely cauterized, so he wasn’t standing in a cloud of frozen blood droplets.
The two men walked up to the corpse. One of them punched the man.
“Damn, Rudy,” he said.
Gareth moved like lightning. Like Death itself.
He lifted the Lasweapon and shot the one in back. Again, a clean hit through the helmet, rupturing the man’s life. The second started to turn, for whatever reason, and unleashed a terrible scream across the radio channels as the beam collapsed his face inward and splashed his brains across the ruptured rear of his helmet.
Again, Gareth dropped his hands and moved back to his spot, just another empty suit.
This ship was haunted. Three of your men have already died, captain. Without a word being spoken.
“Johansson? Mills? What’s going on?” the lead boarder asked.
“What are you men doing over there?” a new voice broke in. Deeper. Authoritative. Probably a pirate captain.
Hopefully, a nervous one.
“Rudy, Johansson, and Mills aren’t responding,” the first man spoke. “We’re moving back to the cargo bay to see why not.”
“Move carefully,” the captain cautioned. “I don’t like this.”
None of them would.
Superstitious. Too many horror vids as kids, or even grownups.
“Mary, Mother of God!” Someone screamed over the radio. “What the hell happened to them?”
“What’s going on?” the captain demanded over the cries and sounds of revulsion.
Sounded like someone just threw up inside his helmet, too. That would be extra yucky, when all you had on was a fishbowl. Gareth could at least puke down into his chest cavity if he needed to.
Finally, the man in charge got the others sorted out.
“All three are dead,” he reported in a shaky voice. “Helmets crushed.”
Crushed? No, but if you refused to get too close, the starring would look like that, maybe.
Angry ghost, anyone?
“Get clear,” the captain ordered. “We’ll blow it out of space and that damned ghost with it. That’ll teach it.”
Gareth grimaced, but it couldn’t be helped. He had hoped more men would emerge and he could pick them off one at a time. Now, the pirate ship would be preparing to destroy the miner.
He only had one chance.
The three emerged, flying across the bay and past him as if the Devil himself was on their heels, the final one crawling almost sideways to see around the puke splattering his helmet. The last pirate was looking right at Gareth when the arms of the miner armor suddenly came up.
The pirate’s blood-curdling scream was the most terrifying thing Gareth had ever imagined might emerge from a human throat, but that didn’t stop him from shooting the man dead. The way it suddenly strangled into a gurgle probably unnerved the rest.
Gareth caught the second pirate with his next shot, even as the man tried to wriggle like a fish on the hook.
The boarding lead was a fish in a barrel, but Gareth had no mercy left in him. He shot the man in flight, watching his corpse bound bonelessly off the far end of the bay to lay crumpled in on the floor, held down by one magnetic boot.
He only had seconds until the captain ordered the other ship to open fire.
Gareth lurched upright and dove to the near corner of the open bay, torqueing the steel with his glove’s exostrength so hard it probably wouldn’t seal again until he cut the plate out and replaced it.
But it got him where he needed to be. He peeked out and saw the pirate vessel only one hundred yards away, slowly rolling away to put some distance between the ships.
If he had a bow gun, it would be facing the wrong way, but the sensors and cameras would show him. Gareth stowed his Lasweapon and threw himself across the space with a running start.
Just because, he opened the radio to transmit for the first time.
“You killed me, now I’ll kill you all,” he snarled over the line in the ugliest, angriest voice he could imagine. “You’ll all be coming to Hell with me.”
Someone left a line open at the other end.
“Captain,” the man screamed. “Oh My God, he’s coming for us!”
Gareth nearly laughed, but he was Sky Patrol and these men had chosen to be pirates. The miner they’d left for dead had probably been the least of their crimes.
The mining armor had compressed nitrogen gas to use for maneuvering. Gareth pushed hard on his thrusters, somersaulting forward until his powerful legs were forward. That ship could outrun him eventually, but they were at a dead stop right now, so they would have to accelerate.
He wasn’t about to allow that.
Instead, Gareth landed on the side of the hull with a terrific force that must have echoed through the pirate vessel like a demon trying to claw his way in. His magnetic boots locked him down and he was part of the pirate ship now.
Quickly, Gareth climbed around the side to the airlock. Most ships this size only had one, located well aft, with perhaps an emergency airlock forward.
Rather than try subtlety, Gareth just climbed inside and grabbed the door that the now-dead boarders had left open. Grunting with effort, and aided by exomuscles designed to lift heavy rocks, Gareth ripped it off its hinges and chucked it into deep space. They might use an emergency airlock, if it existed, but not for a while, and nobody was using this one until they rearranged the interior hatches so they could vent a large section of the ship to open space and not kill themselves and all their friends in the process.
Satisfied, Gareth crawled back out onto the hull and stomped aft until he got to the charge nozzles. Those were already running, starting to push the ship away, so Gareth pulled out his Lasweapon and shot each of the three in order.
A Choueiri Arcjet Ionic Drive was a fragile thing. Each nozzle shattered like a frozen bell dropped from the top of a tower.
Satisfied that the pirates couldn’t get far, Gareth stomped forward on the roof, making sure to slam each magnetic boot down hard as he did, so those men would know that the Devil himself had come for them.
He felt like Beowolf.
Forward, Gareth found the bow gun he had expected. It wasn’t much more rugged than the engine nozzles, but Gareth still used his fists to rip it bodily from the hull rather than just shooting it. Somewhere, a breach alarm would be added to the chaos, as the gunnery chamber was now vented to space, along with any men that hadn’t managed to get out fast enough before the hatches automatically sealed.
Then he went looking and found the emergency airlock. It was closed, which meant that desperate men might come flooding out to attack him. He had calculated the crew to be perhaps as many as two dozen, before the casualties he’d inflicted.
Gareth punched the door frame hard. Again. A third time. A seal gave. A fourth. The door began to surrender to his wrath. A fifth. It failed inward.
No massive breach emptied the ship, so they had sealed the inside.
He could just kill them all now. Rip the inner airlock apart and let all the air surge madly out of the ship. They deserved it.
But Auxiliary Agent Gareth St. John Dankworth was Earth Force Sky Patrol. The good guys.
He had done enough, for now.
He stomped around to where the bridge windows looked out. Inside, a half dozen men stared at him in utter terror, including one man who had to be the captain, better dressed than the others and seated at the rear of the chamber in a chair that reminded Gareth of a throne.
The man had watched too many pirate vids in his time. That, or the steel cutlass on his hip, balancing the flame pistol on the other side, was his signature.
Gareth could not think of a less useful thing to carry into space. But he also wasn’t a pirate.
“Are you ready to join me in hell?” he asked over the radio in a quieter voice.
The men on the bridge were silent, but Gareth could see their mouths open with screams. One even seemed to start foaming.
The captain snapped. Gareth could think of no other word to describe it. The man calmly drew his pistol and shot the two crewmen seated in front of him like a gunner and pilot. Then he shot the other three before they could react.
Finally, he raised the pistol and shot at the window, but Gareth had seen the pistol come up and ducked to one side.
Still, the plasteel window ruptured outward in a massive explosion of air and debris. Bodies raced out into space. Only one of them was still alive, but Gareth shot the captain as he went by, unwilling to risk that man surviving death pressure long enough to fire back.
The gust of snow went on too long.
Gareth realized that the internal hatches were open in the ship, and the whole thing was venting.
More bodies slammed into the window and then got ejected into eternity. Papers and anything light enough went with them.
When it finally died down, Gareth entered via the windows the captain had apparently shot out in his madness.
Inside the ship was a horror show. Every hatch was open, but many men had simply died at their stations, or trapped in their cabins.
It was a flying Dutchman. An abattoir.
They were pirates. Gareth would have found a yardarm for them, but it would have been done the right way. The legal way.
So he supposed that they had just chosen the die on their own terms, rather than at the hands of the law.
He connected a wire to his system and opened the radio.
“Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, this is Dankworth, come in,” he said.
“Gareth!” a friendly voice called back. “Thank God. What’s the situation?”
“Marc, is that you?” Gareth asked.
“Affirmative, my friend,” Auxiliary Agent Marc Sarzynski replied. He had been Gareth’s best friend since they met on the first day of the Academy. “The Commandant needed someone to take charge of your cutter, and I was handy. The rest of the squadron is vectoring in from all corners. What happened?”
“The pirate vessel has been neutralized,” Gareth replied.
“All by yourself?” Marc asked, but he would have done the same. That was the kind of man his best friend was.
“Affirmative, Bellerophon,” Gareth said. “Near the destination point Ferrie calculated. The pirate crew is all dead.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Ghosts frightened them to death, I suppose,” Gareth replied.
After that, he would say no more on the subject.
Birth of the Star Dragon An Earth Force Sky Patrol File: Solar Year 2387
Part One
Criminals
Desperation
“You do realize that this is the stupidly, most completely-insane thing you’ve ever suggested, right?” his partner asked pedantically.
“So far,” Morty corrected sternly, focused on the long control console in front of him. “Only so far, Xiomber. I’m sure it’s going to get much worse before we’re done.”
“You truly believe that a human is the only being that can save galactic civilization from utter ruin?” Xiomber rattled on, leaning against the side of the control board but carefully not touching anything.
“Hey, a human’s going to destroy everything if nobody stops him,” Morty snapped. “And they even have a phrase for this, those folks: fighting fire with fire.”
“Aren’t two fires going to burn the house down twice as fast?” Xiomber sneered.
“We’ve got to find the right human,” Morty replied. “The one Sarzynski is always going on about. Would you talk that way about anybody if they weren’t your worst nemesis?”
“I talk about you that way all the time,” Xiomber reminded him.
Morty didn’t have a good response for that one. But he and Xiomber were egg-brothers, partners in science as well as in crime. And a lizard needed a friend watching his back. The galaxy was a big and dangerous place.
It had just grown bigger and more dangerous since the boss, the old boss, had decided that what he really needed was a human assassin as part of his team.
What other species could do violence without the slightest drop of empathy in them, after all? Humans weren’t part of the Accord of Souls. Hadn’t been Uplifted by the Elders, the grand and now long-vanished Chaa, and bound into a single, psionic whole as a way to bring peace between diverse solar tribes.
Hell, when the Chaa left, humans were still banging the rocks together, hoping someone was listening.
Who knew that they would suddenly evolve into an intelligent species and discover technology? It was all the Accord of Souls could do to keep humans isolated in their own home system and ignorant of everyone else. Safer that way, by far.
“You going to help or not?” Morty finally asked, looking up from the panel of knobs and gauges in front. “’Cause if not, then you need to go into the other room and not call the cops until I’m gone. That, or shoot me now, before I go and commit the worst crime imaginable on the books. Again.”
He looked over at Xiomber, waiting for the damned lizard to make up his mind. Most species had a hard time reading emotions in the Yuudixtl. The Warreth probably came closest, since they had feathers that could semaphore to communicate, so they had half a clue.
Yuudixtl just had scales. Stripes and blobs and patterns that didn’t really mean anything, since the Chaa had fixed their genetics when they uplifted the intelligent lizards to be one of the galactic custodians.
Xiomber was keeping his scales flat and starkly uncommunicative.
Like Morty, Xiomber was mostly kinda a gray-green somewhere a little darker than sage, but not down in that totally sexy range of a Terran crocodile. It was a shame that Yuudixtl couldn’t be upgraded any further. Crocodile would be freaking awesome.
And probably useful right now, since a renegade human assassin had already killed the boss and pretty much taken over the whole organization, murdering anybody who tried to stop him or even looked at him funny.
The Yuudixtl were the smallest intelligent species in space. And maybe the smartest. They followed the basic uplift design the Chaa had selected: symmetric biped with sense organs on the head and opposable thumbs. If they were only half the height of the Vanir, and a third their mass, they made up for it in smarts.
Or had, right up until he and Xiomber had listened to Cinnra, the old Boss, and built him an illegal wormhole generator to capture a human killer, one step ahead of the human cops catching the guy, back in the Earth system.
Probably the dumbest thing they’d done, but only so far.
Morty looked forward to topping it in about five minutes.
Xiomber’s dark green eyes slitted down hard and his scowl intensified.
“You’re nuts,” his partner repeated. “But what’s the worst they could do? Throw us both in prison for two lifetimes instead of one? Scoot over.”
“Me?” Marty razzed. “Why do I have to move?”
“Because you’ll probably screw it up and pull the wrong guy through again.”
“That was one time, and it was a chicken,” Morty defended himself. “And you’re the one who swore the machine was calibrated correctly.”
Still, he leaned back and let Xiomber kinda hip check him out of the way. Quickly, four green hands flashed over the long rows of dials, tweaking things down and refining the target zone. They would probably only get one shot at this, because the power surge when they tripped all the generators would get someone’s attention.
Maximus Sarzynski, wanna-be ultimate crime lord, would not take it well, him and his egg-brother digging up the guy’s worst enemy and pulling him halfway across the galaxy as an insurance policy.
And unlike the Uplifted Species in the Accord of Souls, Maximus could kill them without the slightest hesitation or provocation. Just what old Cinnra had wanted in an hired gun.
He had only really screwed up when he thought that he could control a human afterwards.
“You figured out how we escape?” Xiomber asked out of the side of his mouth. “Those damned birds will roll over as soon as the new Boss yells boo. Then they’re coming after us. And we sure as hell can’t go to the cops with something like this.”
“Kinda planning on cheating,” Morty replied. “That’s why I wanted you in the other room if you weren’t going to help.”
“Oh, fardel,” Xiomber snapped. “Now what?”
“After we grab the human, I was going to redirect him right through another wormhole, and jump in after him,” Morty said carefully. “This controller is kinda programmed to overload and eat itself, so nobody can chase us, or figure out where we went.”
“Are you sure we came from the same egg batch?” Xiomber growled. “’Cause I don’t remember any of my siblings being that dumb. Where do you think they’ll look?”
“I’m not sending him to Yuudixtl,” Morty replied. “Like you figured, first place Maximus will look.”
“Where then, Morty?” his partner got serious. Way serious. Like maybe thinking-about-overcoming-the-empath-bond-so-he-could-kill him serious. “Where you are dumping us out?”
“Orgoth Vortai,” Morty said in a quiet, careful voice, expecting to get punched in the snout.
Instead, Xiomber turned and stared at him for several seconds, jaw agape. And then he started laughing.
Morty relaxed and zeroed down the last few gauges. The range was stupid long for a shot like this, doubly so on a bounce-tube, but they also had an exact match of the psionic coordinates that had located Maximus the killer in the first place. All Morty had needed to do was flip them end for end and find the man who was Sarzynski’s psionic opposite.
A good guy.
“You ready to do this?” Morty asked as Xiomber settled down.
“Why the hell not?” Xiomber said. “I always wanted to visit the world of the tentacle-heads. With any luck, they’ll look at the whole, damned thing as a monstrous art installation. Maybe a performance piece for the ages.”
“That was actually part of my original logic,” Morty admitted. “They already do crazy shit. What’s one thing more?”
He reached out and grabbed the second-to-last slider, ramming it to the top of the scale with a hard click. Several floors below, a dozen generators began to hum. In moments, they were singing. Shortly, the metal would begin to scream.
Around them, overhead lights flickered and then a few exploded, throwing rooster tails of sparks and smoke in all directions as Morty’s device started pumping too much power through the entire building. At least nobody would be using this tube generator station again.
But boy, was Maximus going to be pissed.
“Ready?” Morty yelled.
“Do it,” Xiomber shouted over the rising din. “We’re not going to hold this much longer.”
Morty grabbed the last slider and pushed it slowly forward.
“Energizing,” he hollered back.
In the area beyond the control console, a golden nimbus of energy formed, and quickly resolved itself into a pair of tube openings, like a hose that had been sliced neatly in half.
Morty stared hard at the zone controls, watching the screen’s targeting array home in on the target he had selected.
“Almost got it,” he yelled, starting to smell smoke rising.
The console was probably close to catching fire, with the energy they were processing through it.
“Now, Morty,” Xiomber screamed. “It’s not going to stay intact much longer.”
Morty slammed a fist down on the big, purple button and listened to the generators reach for that last two percent.
Definitely getting bright in here. Maybe a little warm.
“Let’s go,” he scrambled around the console and began to run towards the nexus of the bounce-tube.
“What if you missed?” Xiomber was a step behind him.
“Then our goose is right cooked when Maximus finds out, and we’ve got nobody to hide behind,” Morty replied.
Something was coming through the first tunnel. Morty could see the left-hand tube pulsate, like a snake swallowing a rat. Hope to the Gods this worked, because he also saw a door open at the far end of the lab.
“What’s going on in here?”
Field Agent
Gareth St. John Dankworth. Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol.
Gods, that sounded awesome. And looked even better. He had finally made it. He was a Field Agent now. Lawman extraordinaire. Respected across the entire Solar System.
Gareth stared again at his reflection in the wall mirror of his quarters. He was at The Arsenal, Sky Patrol’s base in the Earth/Moon L2 point, over beyond the dark side of the moon. Affectionately called Shadow Base One.
His new uniform was amazing. Still the black riding boots and white hotpants of a Sky Patrol Agent, but now his maroon tunic finally said Field Agent. Three white rings around the big, stylized SP in the center of his chest, offset by gold buttons up both sides of the bib and the gold wing-protectors on his shoulders like short fins.
He tugged the tunic down a little, settling it a little tighter beneath the black, Sam Brown belt. He ran a hand back through his curly, blond hair, just getting long enough to blow in the wind, so it was probably time to get it shorn again, as it had reached the maximum length that the regulations allowed.
Field Agent.
Damn, he looked good.
Best of all, he could finally propose to Philippa, after they had both waited for so long, both of them staying chaste and pure, until he could make it all the way to Field Agent and they could be married. Gareth reached a hand down into his pocket and pulled out the tiny, leather pouch he kept with him at all times.
From inside, he extracted the gold ring with the single, white diamond in the middle, surrounded by ruby and gold stones representing Sky Patrol. Tonight was the night. He’d catch a shuttle over to the Earth/Moon L1 point in an hour. She was working as a research assistant for her father these days, at Earth Force Headquarters, so it would be easy enough to take her aside after dinner, during a walk along the Promenade overlooking the Moon’s bright side, and propose to her properly.
He was a Field Agent now. All that waiting would be over, and they could finally become man and wife.
He smiled at the ring, tucking it back into the pouch and stashing it in his pocket.
Not long now.
A sound brought his head up.
It was a strange humming sound, almost imperceptible, hovering right at the point of audibility. Almost as if a fly was trying to sneak around the room behind him, but wasn’t succeeding.
Gareth looked all directions with a concerned scowl on his face. He was in his personal quarters at The Arsenal. Nobody ever came in except the cleaning crew, so the room was as pristine as his bunk had always been in school, bed made so taut that a shilling coin could bounce a foot high.
Except that the room had taken on a golden hue. Odd.
There was nothing wrong with the lights. They still put out the perfect, crisp white of the fifth generation organic diodes, but the air itself was turning golden.
Bizarre.
And now something faded into existence across the room, like a film of fog melting, only run in reverse. This mirage appeared to be the source of the gold, and it was growing, both in size and intensity.
Panic woke up at the back of Gareth’s brain. He had always been noted for his bravery and leadership, but today, those parts of his mind seemed to be having second thoughts. There was no science he could think of that explained a portable whirlpool suddenly appearing in the air in the middle of his cabin.
Maybe it was time to do something.
A wind came up suddenly, inside his cabin at the center of a space station, ruffling his hair as greedy fingers began to pluck at his soul.
His soul?
Very much not good.
Gareth sprang into action, like the hero he had always been. He raced to the door, keying the internal telephone system and picking up the headset.
“Base Operator,” a woman’s bored voice answered.
“This is Field Agent Dankworth,” he said, voice struggling to remain calm. “Cabin 24-575. Something’s happening in my room. Something bad.”
“Could you be clearer, Field Agent?” the laconic operator replied. It sounded like maybe she had one hand up, inspecting her nails as she spoke.
“I’ve got an emergency here, miss,” he yelled, feeling those golden fingers begin to caress his back.
The wind was stronger now, tugging insistently closer to the hole in the universe that was growing over in the corner.
Hole in the universe?
“Please state the nature of your emergency,” she replied, maybe reading from a script now.
Gareth tried to think of the right words, but the pull of the tempest was too great now. Fight it as he tried, the force literally dragged him across the cabin, stretching the cord of the handset until it was pulled right out of his hands, falling to the wall with a thunk as Gareth’s legs went numb.
Looking down, his lower half appeared to be fading out of existence, right at the event horizon of that golden light. The golden fingers crept up his nerves, pulling him under with grim determination.
Oh, shit.
Wormhole
It was like going down a waterslide as a kid, vacationing with his parents at a theme park dedicated to the South Seas, back home in Indiana. Gareth couldn’t see anything except the sides of a golden tube of light, but when he put his hand out to touch, they pulled back.
He couldn’t fall any slower, or faster, regardless of what he did. And it felt like he was simultaneously the size of a mouse and of a whale.
Screaming like a little girl didn’t seem to help, either. Or rather, nobody was listening, which was probably good. Gareth wondered if he was going to keep on falling forever.
There, in the distance between his toes, Gareth saw something. Darkness, perhaps. A gap. Maybe the end of the tunnel, thank God.
He seemed to be slowing down. Or something.
Yes. The tunnel ended there. He could sense a room just beyond it.
Gareth felt his brain and his soul drop back into phase with the rest of the universe. What the name of Heaven was that?
He found himself standing in a clearing. Surrounded by trees out of the worst nightmares the ancient artist Dali had ever dreamt up: bark the wrong color, trunks somehow the wrong shape, and with leaves that looked like nothing so much as feathers.
The space here was that same golden hue of his cabin, and the tunnel.
Standing in front of him were a pair of three-foot-tall lizards, dressed in pants and t-shirts, standing upright and eyeing him like dinner. Gareth would have given a month’s salary to be holding his Sonic Stunner right now, but it was safely locked up, back at The Arsenal.
Wait, lizards?
The room howled as well. Gareth considered joining it, but one of the lizard-men hopped into the air and tossed something into his mouth, rather like a jelly bean.
Jelly bean? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Gareth went to spit it out, but the bean had already dissolved and melted itself to his tongue, like the best peanut butter on a PBJ sandwich.
Gareth chewed frantically, trying to escape its clutches.
“That work?” the closer lizard-man asked.
Gareth turned, utterly shocked that these things spoke English. Had somebody slipped a Mickey Finn into his drink at dinner? Was this all some sort of hallucination as part of a failed seduction attempt? Who would he wake up next to in the morning?
He chewed, unable to speak. The one who had spoken wore a logo on his shirt, but it honestly looked like an old, ratty concert T-shirt, rather than the more stylized Sky Patrol SP on Gareth’s chest.
“You can understand me?” the lizard asked. “Just nod.”
Gareth complied, nightmares of Alice and toadstools haunting him. He scanned the feathered trees nearby for Cheshire Cats.
“We need to get gone,” the other lizard-man told the first. “Somebody’s going to remember us.”
“Okay,” the first said, staring hard at Gareth like he was a badly-trained puppy. “You need to come with us, so we can get someplace private and I can explain everything. This is not a dream, but it could become a nightmare, without too much effort. Are you safe to touch?”
“What?” Gareth managed around the peanut butter. “What’s the meaning of this?”
The lizard-man sighed and his shoulders slumped. A twinkle came into his eyes after a second and he smiled.
“Humans are the most dangerous, lethal species in the galaxy, okay?” he said. “You’ve been kept confined in your solar system until you matured enough to not be a threat to everyone else, which is not today. Except one of your kind got loose, and it threatening to destroy all galactic civilization. Nobody can stop this killer, so we took a gamble and kidnapped you. You might be the only person who can save us.”
Gareth felt a surge of pride rush through him. Earth Force Sky Patrol. The Good Guys.
Field Agent Gareth St. John Dankworth, ready to serve.
He stood taller, shoulders back and head up. Which kind of ruined the scene, since these two might have been three and a half feet tall.
“Who is my foe?” Gareth announced boldly. “What do I need to do?”
The two lizard-men shared a glance, and a smile, it seemed.
“Marc Sarzynski,” the first one said. “Called Maximus.”
“That bastard’s here?” Gareth growled in shock. “No wonder he escaped me. Where are we?”
“The planet is named Orgoth Vortai,” the second one said. “Home of a species known as The Grace.”
“Species?” Gareth wasn’t sure he heard the word right.
“You got it, pal,” the first said. “There are over a dozen sentient, technological species in the Accord of Souls. The Grace are not quite the weirdest, but they’re close. And when one wants to talk to you, and they will, be prepared to be touched. Now, can we go get some tea and hide out?”
“Maximus is here?” Gareth reiterated.
“Not on this planet, but we know where he is, once you’re ready,” the tiny lizardman said.
“And I’m not stoned out of my mind on Bennies and Smack?” he continued.
“On what?” the second one asked.
“Mind-altering, hallucinogenic narcotics,” Gareth explained. “Humans take them as an escape from everyday life.”
“Nope, we need you sober, pal,” the first lizard-man said. “It’s already going to be weird enough as is.”
“What was that thing you put in my mouth?” Gareth asked, finally having swallowed the last bits. Or maybe they had dissolved completely.
“A transform virus programmed for humans,” the little man said. “It inoculated you against most diseases, as well as programmed your brain to be able to speak our language. You don’t think the rest of us spoke English, do you?”
“Oh,” Gareth said. “Maybe I do need a drink.”
“Tea first,” the lizard-man said. “I’m sure we’ll need something stronger later. Ready to join us?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Gareth said, pretty unsure of all of this, but willing to stay put. Maybe.
“Good,” the first said. “Now, we’re going to exit this park, cross a couple of blocks, and hit a tea shop nearby. If anyone asks, you’re just a runt Vanir, okay? Humans are the absolute embodiment of evil, as far as anyone knows, but nobody really knows what a human looks like, and you’re close enough to pass for a Vanir for now. We good?”
“What are your names?” Gareth asked. “I am Field Agent Gareth St. John Dankworth, of the Earth Force Sky Patrol, Missile Division, 6th Cavalry Troop.”
“Yeah, and if you ever mention that again, your ass will be in a jail cell so fast your head will spin, pal,” the one said. “Ours right beside you. We’ll never see the light of day again, and Maximus will end up Emperor of the Universe. So keep it quiet. We’ll just call you Gareth, for now. I’m Morty, and this is my egg-brother, Xiomber. Let’s go.”
Gareth found himself following the first little lizardman. He had been so focused earlier he hadn’t even really processed the fact that he was standing in a small clearing of an arboreal forest of some sort, next to a thing that looked remarkably like a bizarre garden maze, except the walls were only four feet tall and made of a weird mix of metal, wood, and flowering plants, with lots of open spaces allowing sunlight and breezes through.
He glanced up, trying to measure the time, and stopped so fast that Xiomber ran into him from behind.
“Hey, friend,” Xiomber barked. “Little warning next time?”
“The sky…” Gareth’s words tapered off.
It was close enough to noon, with the sun more or less overhead. But the sky was pink-orange, somewhere between cotton candy and first-run salmon from back home.
THERE WAS NO BLUE, ANYWHERE IN THE SKY!
“Quieter, please, Gareth,” Morty smacked him on the thigh, breaking the hypnotic spell that had fallen over him. “You’re not on Earth anymore, m’kay? This is Orgoth Vortai. C’mon.”
Right.
Gareth fell in behind Morty again, walking in a calm daze. Alien planet named Orgoth Vortai. Sure. Surrounded by talking lizardmen. Why the hell not?
The trees ended suddenly and Gareth was on a sidewalk. Maybe. Whatever the local, planetary equivalent was.
And it was moving. Both of them. Wow. There was a path moving to the right, with a second one, closer to the street, moving to the left.
And people.
People? Sure, why not? I’m completely stoned now. Whatever they gave me has gone all the way in and now I’m riding the lysergic acid all the way to the end of the rainbow, where I’ll find the leprechaun level monster, waiting for me to fight him to the death for his pot of gold.
Gareth must have stopped walking again. Xiomber just stepped up and took his hand, like a child leading a parent around a theme park.
They got on the moving sidewalk, and Gareth smiled politely at the woman in front of him as she turned and studied him.
Except it wasn’t a woman. Or, maybe it was. She had curves. A fantastic bottom, narrow waist, ripe bosom contained in some sort of silky wrap that looked like a fairies’ cocoon.
But her skin was green. And her eyes had slits, kinda like Morty and Xiomber, rather than irises. Like a snake, or a cat. Except she looked like a snake, with long, green-black hair. Except that wasn’t hair. Those were snakes.
She was a medusa.
Gareth nearly screamed again, but Xiomber jerked his hand hard enough to nearly make him fall over. He rounded angrily on the little man.
“You’re staring,” Xiomber growled quietly up at him. “It’s impolite. And she might take it as invitation to talk. Those tentacles on her head? You know, where you have hair and I have a bone crest? Those are sensors pods that combine touch, taste, and smell. The Grace are a very tactile species. Let’s not today, okay?”
Tactile. Right. All those snake-hair-thingees slithering over his skin?
If he ignored the tentacles, she was an amazingly beautiful woman.
Medusa.
Something.
Maybe she’d turn him to stone, if he wasn’t careful.
Or if he was lucky.
Gareth smiled weakly at her and turned his attention to the rest of the city.
Oh My God!
Earth had nothing like this. It was like a fairy tale, with impossibly tall buildings of all shapes and colors. Some were stone. Others were glass. A few appeared to be forests that had been transformed, like a giant’s banzai tree experiment, plopped down in the middle of a city.
The woman behind them on the sidewalk smiled as he accidentally made eye contact.
Gareth managed not to scream. And pulled his mouth shut and held it there by grinding his teeth. She was a cat. No, a lynx, covered over with cream and gray fur, standing more than five and a half feet tall, wearing harem pants and loose top in matching baby blue silk. The face was close enough to human that it might be a mask, once he got past the magnificent, muttonchop sideburns and the ears on top, except that her ears moved, one rotating towards him like a radar dish as he watched in awe.
“Morty, we need to debark,” Xiomber said loud enough that the other turned. “Now.”
Xiomber tugged his hand and Gareth stumbled briefly as they landed on the sidewalk.
The lady-lynx kept riding by, but handed him a business card written in vermillion ink as she passed him with a hopeful smile. The smell on the card was almost enough to make Gareth chase after her.
“What are you?” Xiomber groused in awe. “Bottled animal magnetism? Morty, we gotta get this one undercover quick, before we’ve got a mob of horny women after us. That’s two already.”
There was a break in the traffic going the other way. The one called Morty bolted through it. Xiomber followed, dragging Gareth along numbly.
He was still holding the card, sniffing her scent. She made him feel all tingly inside, and kinda goofy. But it also let Xiomber pull him easier.
Traffic magically seemed to part around them, and Morty ducked into a shop, the other two in quick pursuit.
Now he’d gone blind.
Except, not blind. Sun blind. There. Man, it was dark in here. Okay, table. Bench. Sit. Good. Sniff card. Wow.
“Put that away,” Morty snapped. “I need you coherent. Not dunk on the scent of a Nari in season.”
“A what?” Gareth asked weakly.
“That woman on the slidewalk,” Morty pointed back over his shoulder. “She’s a Nari. She gave you a scent marker. Didn’t think Nari did that, outside of their own kind. It’s frightening, the power you have over women, pal. In other circumstances, we’d put that to use, but right now we need to hide.”
Reluctantly, Gareth pulled out his wallet and slipped her card in with the others he had accumulated from scientists and politicians he had met. It was sized close enough to fit.
The two lizardmen were eyeing him when he looked up.
“What?” he asked, nervous.
“Nothing,” Morty said.
Gareth watched him signal to a waitress. She was another of The Grace, although not as voluptuous as the first. If she were human, Gareth would have guessed her to be a teenage girl, perhaps. Petite and thin.
This one smiled, too, but Morty growled for her to get the tea if she wanted a tip, so she just winked at Gareth and sashayed away. She also had a mesmerizing bottom.
“Hey, pal,” Xiomber cracked wise. “Eyes over here, please.”
“Right,” Gareth reluctantly turned to the others, trying to figure out why he was here. Wherever here was. “So the two of you are criminals, engaged in a major felonious enterprise, and somehow I’m both the crime and the prize?”
“A little louder next time, maybe?” Morty snapped. “I don’t think the cook heard you in back. You wanna be in jail?”
“Sorry,” Gareth dropped to a murmur. “A little excited here. I’ve never been on an alien planet before. What’s next?”
“Now, we hide you from Maximus until we can get you to a lab and make some improvements to you,” Morty said. “Maximus has been doing the same to himself, but I don’t think he dreams big enough. At least not yet.”
“Maximus,” Gareth growled, remembering he was a cop. “What’s he doing now? And how do we stop him?”
Gareth watched the two share a guilty glance silently for a moment. Morty shrugged.
“So until about ten minutes ago, we were members of a criminal gang,” Morty began in a voice so quiet Gareth had to lean all the way down close to hear. “Our old boss, Cinnra, was a Warreth scientist, with aspirations of taking over the whole criminal underworld, across the entire Accord of Souls.”
“What’s a Warreth?” Gareth asked carefully, trying not to talk so loud that he got arrested just when the little man got to the good parts.
Xiomber leaned in and cut his brother off.
“Think birdman, Gareth,” he said simply. “Earth has lots of bird species, so imagine a humanoid a little shorter than you, about half your mass, covered with feathers.”
“Birdman,” Gareth acknowledged. “Got it.”
Sure. Why the hell not?
“So Cinnra had us build a very illegal, psionic wormhole generator, and locate him a human assassin,” Morty continued. “This would have been about, uhm…”
He paused, apparently doing some math in his head, eyes fixed on some strange spot on the ceiling.
“Maybe five Earth months ago?” Morty asked. “I think.”
“That was when Sarzynski escaped me,” Gareth snarled quietly. “We had him holed up with his gang. He escaped, and they all swore it was some weird gold light that did it. Oh, shit. Gold light. You guys.”
“Yup,” Xiomber noted with pride. “Boss nailed down the shape of the psionic signature he wanted in a human, and had us program it into the scanner. Bada-bing, bada-boom, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“Uhm, what?”
“He said we located our target and extracted him, one step ahead of the arm of law enforcement,” Morty explained. “You, given all the bitching Maximus has done about you since then.”
“Oh,” Gareth said with his own surge of pride. “So you recruited an assassin?”
“Yeah, but Cinnra thought he could control the human,” Morty said. “Found that out the hard way when Maximus turned on him.”
“What did the rest of the gang do?” Gareth asked.
“Went along with it,” Morty said. “The human’s a freaking killer. Our choices were pretty stark here. Your kind are not known for being the forgiving types, you know?”
“We’re not all like that,” Gareth replied.
He wanted to say more, but the young girl with the tentacles returned with a cast iron tea pot and three mugs. She set the pot down in the center of the table by leaning past Gareth.
He flinched and nearly screamed when several of her tentacles caressed his hair and neck.
“Hey,” Morty snapped. “You want me to get the manager out here?”
“Sorry,” she purred, withdrawing dreamily.
Gareth watched her face turn nearly umber with blush as she stepped back.
His subconscious couldn’t decide if the feeling had been feathers caressing him, or teeth looking for a place to bite. Or both.
Xiomber poured a mug and handed it to him, before serving them. Gareth sipped carefully, but the taste was yummy.
“So that thing you put in my mouth,” he asked after a moment. “How’d you know that would work? You said Maximus and I were the only humans here.”
“We reprogrammed him the same way,” Xiomber explained. “We can do that with humans, because they aren’t part of the Accord of Souls.”
“What do you mean: reprogram?” Gareth felt an uneasy tide nibble at his toes.
“The Chaa uplifted all the species to sentience a long time ago,” Morty said. “Before they left, as a matter of fact, and turned most of their own kind into the Vanir. Those Left Behind. But they also fixed everyone’s genetics pretty hard. We can eliminate disease and all that, but nobody can be improved past where the Masters left us all.”
“Except humans?” Gareth guessed. “And Maximus is upgrading himself? Like bad?”
“He’s improved his brain, so he’s way smarter than he used to be,” Xiomber explained.
“That’s bad,” Gareth replied. “Marc Sarzynski was a renegade from the Sky Patrol. Part of my class of Agents, before he went bad. Turned criminal. But he was already at the top of the pack, then. If he’s smarter now, you’re in trouble. We’re in trouble.”
Maximus
“You’re sure what it was that you observed?” Marc Sarzynski asked again, scowling heavily at the men of his gang, arrayed below him in the space that he thought of as his throne room.
It had been Cinnra’s personal aerie, once upon a time. Marc liked the vaulted ceilings above him, as well as the stone slabs stepping down from where he had put his throne. Each was about ten yards across by twenty wide, and the whole room was a series of steps. The only change he had made was to have a couple of Yuudixtl add stair steps everywhere, so all the non-gliders could get around here easily, and not just the Warreth.
He was recruiting more, these days, and going outside the insular Warreth clans that had been the basis of Cinnra’s power. The gang would need to feel more comfortable in here.
Marc scanned the mob of aliens a level below him, nearly a hundred faces from strange nightmares staring back. Five months ago, he had never even imagined that aliens existed. And now he had at least twelve species actively serving him.
The Warreth male at the center flattened his headcrest some as he spoke, an unconscious reflex that Marc had finally learned was the equivalent of a dog tucking his tail under. Body language of submission. It was good, being in charge. Things would get done around here, finally.
“The generators had all started running at once, so I went into the lab to see what was going on,” Deoar said, somehow pitching his voice loud while not sounding threatening.
The survivors of the takeover had all learned that lesson.
“When I got there, Xiomber and Morty had powered up the wormhole generator and were pulling someone through,” the birdman continued.
The creature reminded Marc of a Stellar Jay, with blue and black feathers, even though his beak was nowhere near as long as it would have been. Deoar’s was shorter, almost petite. Just enough to crack walnuts, rather than dipping into flowers.
“So somebody came through the first tube,” Deoar said. “Just as I entered the room. Then they bounced him out using a second tube and jumped in right after him. About that moment, the console overloaded and I had to concentrate on putting out the fires, but I know what I saw.”
“Describe it again,” Marc said in a voice that couldn’t help but be threatening. His nerves were shot this morning. It was not possible, what Deoar had described.
“Before I met you, boss, I would have said a short Vanir,” the birdman continued. “But I’m pretty sure it was a human. Same build, but not as tall. About what you used to be, a little taller than me. Golden hair.”
“Yes, yes,” Marc said. “The clothing. What was he wearing.”
“Garnet jacket with gold letters on a black logo and gold shoulder pieces,” Deoar replied. “Three white rings around the logo on the chest. White pants. Black boots.”
“And golden hair?” Marc confirmed.
“You got it, boss.”
Marc slammed one first down onto the armrest of the new throne but otherwise contained his emotions. Fear was a useful thing, in small doses. It would not do to completely frighten his people out of their wits.
“Ladies and gentleman, I should be possessed of an anger for the very gods, right now,” he pronounced, watching the five score aliens below him recoil half a step at the thought, anyway. Yes, fear of god was a thing they understood. “And I will exercise that rage on those two little traitors when we find them. Xiomber and Morty are to be killed, without mercy. But today is also our lucky day. They’ve managed to locate my worst enemy and actually bring to me, here in the Accord of Souls. The human Deoar has described is a Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol. For humans, the equivalent of the Vanir Constabulary, with just about as much sense of humor. That human is most likely Gareth St. John Dankworth.”
Marc rose from his throne and began to pace. He had the entire top platform to himself. Skylights overhead cast him in alternate spotlights and shadows as he moved.
“They will probably not have taken him to Yuudixtl, but alert our agents there anyway,” Marc commanded. “Instead, we need to be on the lookout for another human loose in Accord space. Perhaps we should alert the authorities, as well.”
Marc picked out a Nari male off to one side. Unlike most of the gang, Zorge was older, well into Nari middle-age, with white fur coming in along the edges of the orange and gray stripes. And he had actively chosen a life of crime, rather than being forced into it by circumstances.
If the cat-man had possessed any greater ambitions in life, Marc probably would have had to kill him when he first took over, but Zorge was content working as a spy, maneuvering in the shadows. All he wanted to do was run his own little network of informants. It was good.
“Pass an anonymous tip to the Vanir,” Marc ordered the old cat. “Let them know that there is a human loose in Accord space. Emphasize the golden hair, though.”
That got a laugh as Marc ran a hand back through his own pitch-black curls. In that, he looked much more like a typical Vanir, darker of skin and hair than Dankworth. And a foot taller, these days. If the so-called, self-appointed, Custodians of Order weren’t so damned tall, a human like Gareth could have easily passed himself off as one, but the women alone were six and a half feet tall, and the men usually seven. Freaking giants.
Like Maximus was now.
Morty and Xiomber had been in the process of researching how to rebuild him again, even better than the Vanir he appeared to be. He already had the perfect disguise, so perhaps their betrayal now was in his best interests. Internally, Marc shuddered at the thought of what those two damnable, lizard scientists might have done to him, had he put himself under their care for greater transformation when they were intent on duplicity.
The room had fallen silent at his introspective pacing. They knew better than to interrupt, but no new genius insight bubbled up right now. He was still getting used to having an IQ of two hundred by human standards.
“Find him,” Marc growled to his mob. “Bring him to me.”
Tea Room
Gareth had settled down some. The tea was amazingly good in this place, a gentle blend of vanilla, caramel, oolong, and some sort of berry that just seemed to fill in all the happy spaces in his soul.
Briefly, he wondered if the twins had added something to the jelly bean they had fed him, to make him calmer than he should have been. Probably not the worst idea, given their opinion of humans.
Morty was off, making a phone call to someone. And possibly having a smoke, if Gareth understood the vernacular correctly. He would need to have a chat with the Yuudixtl scientist later on the evils of tobacco, or whatever it was.
Xiomber had run to the men’s room, leaving Gareth alone for the briefest moment.
Keelee had just delivered a second pot of tea, leaning so close that she briefly seemed to press one breast against his shoulder in ways that made Gareth extremely self-conscious. Worse, at least half a dozen tentacles had taken their time tasting him.
Or whatever The Grace called it. It was positively pornographic, the way her tentacles caressed his skin, ran through his hair, idled at the edge of his collar. She seemed to hum, or perhaps purr, as she did so.
Gareth realized he was never, ever going to ogle a waitress in a public house again. Or perhaps any woman. His own behavior had never been all that bad, but suddenly he was on the receiving end of what his men had frequently done to those poor women they had encountered at landfalls, trapped by the need to remain quiet in a bar, rather than staging a loud, emotional scene in public that would get them fired. If Gareth reacted loudly, called attention to the treatment he was receiving, he’d be arrested.
By the Gods, he would be much more of stickler for the rules, if he ever got home. This sort of thing was just embarrassingly rude.
As was the way he seemed to be enjoying the feel of Keelee’s tentacles exploring his skin.
Thoughts of Philippa suddenly flashed to mind and he sat bolt upright.
“Keelee, you need to stop now,” he demanded weakly. “Xiomber will be back soon, and I don’t want you to get fired.”
She laughed, throatily, but withdrew, the most polite sandpaper to ever set his nerves afire. Gareth breathed heavily and concentrated on pouring himself more tea.
Burning his throat seemed like a good idea right now, but he blew on the mug anyway.
Morty and Xiomber returned at the same moment from different directions.
“Fardel,” Morty swore quietly. “You left him alone?”
“I wasn’t sure if you were coming back, Morty,” Xiomber snapped. “And I really had to pee. Besides, it’s not like he was going anywhere.”
“You okay, kid?” Morty asked Gareth. “You look a little flustered.”
“Huh?” Gareth looked over at the tiny man. “What?”
“I know a guy,” Morty said. “Had to skip my usual contact here, because she’s a she and I don’t need that level of complication right now. Let’s go. We need to get you changed into something a lot less obvious, and then off this planet before any of the old gang tracks us down.”
“You find us a lab?” Xiomber asked.
Gareth watched the other twin pull something from his back pocket and hold it up. It was almost a floppy wallet, but it was as big as his palm and barely half an inch thick. Looked like leather, though.
“Remember, I got everything here we need, but we still need to baseline the monkey-boy before we get crazy,” Xiomber continued.
“That’s next,” Morty said, digging into a pocket and pulling out several coins that he dropped on the table.
“Did you leave a tip for Keelee?” Gareth asked.
“Who?”
“Our waitress,” Gareth replied.
“How did you know…crap, she tasted you, didn’t she?” Morty snarled.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Gareth protested defensively.
“Except now she can describe you to the cops,” Morty hissed angrily. “We gotta get gone, right now.”
Gareth followed them out into the street. Morty pulled out a pocketcomm similar to the one Gareth would have had with him, except it was sitting on his dresser, back at The Arsenal, along with his money, his ID, and his Sonic Stunner travel vault.
Morty pressed a button and looked up. Within moments, a flying car dropped out of the sky like a gray hawk, landed right in front of them, and a side door full-winged open.
“Get in,” Morty commanded.
Gareth more or less fell into the vehicle, finding the back of the sky chariot a comfortable cocoon of crushed blue velvet. He sat on the bench facing forward, with Xiomber next to him and Morty across the way. The seat belts were more or less intuitive, but the two Yuudixtl didn’t move to put theirs on.
“Seatbelts?” Gareth prompted.
“Seriously?” Xiomber glanced up, but he huffed and pulled the straps on. A moment later, Morty did the same. “Morty, we gotta talk about this guy.”
“Dead or Jail, Xiomber,” Morty reminded his brother. “Those are your other choices.”
Gareth discovered that a Yuudixtl could roll his eyes, just like a human. With the same level of apparent teen angst and ennui.
Some things were apparently universal.
The car leapt into the air, driving Gareth back into the seat and reminding him why the seatbelts were such a good idea. A moment later, the car banked hard and shot off horizontally. Gareth probably would have ended up on top of Xiomber if he hadn’t been already strapped down.
Xiomber looked up and came to the same conclusion. The grumbling under his breath ceased.
Outside, an exotic wonderland of a magical city swept by. Towers and sky bridges and flying cars.
And an angel.
Gareth found himself with his nose pressed against the glass of the window and his hands up, like a six-year-old on a long drive.
Maybe an angel. Human-looking, with wings that looked twenty feet wide as it flapped, holding a pocketcomm in his hands and watching something.
“Wazzat?” he almost drooled on the glass.
Morty leaned over and peeked.
“Elohynn,” he said. “One of the Accord Species. Empaths. Damned good counselors. Right bastards as bankers, though.
“How many species are there?” Gareth asked, watching the man fade into the distance as the taxi sped away and then slipped around a corner.
“Seventeen,” Xiomber asked. “Three others are candidates, in another few thousand years. Humans are not, however. Too freaking dangerous.”
“You keep saying that,” Gareth turned to the scientist. “Why?”
“The Accord of Souls didn’t have a word for murder, Gareth,” he replied flatly. “We had to use yours. Same goes for all the different levels of killing you crazy barbarians to do each other. Some people might pass out, just hearing the word xenocide. If the Chaa were still around, they might have either fixed you, like they did the other uplifted species, or just wiped you out. The betting’s about even right now, but it’s going to tilt pretty heavy if the galaxy ever finds out about Maximus and his gang.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Gareth asked. “Don’t human’s stand out?”
“We were successful in turning him into a Vanir,” Morty said. “Those Left Behind are what’s left of the Chaa. When they evolved beyond material forms, only a few really wanted to go, so they took it upon themselves to become gods. Transformed the rest of their kin into the current form. But to keep them from getting lonely, so the story goes, they uplifted all the other species at the same time.”
“And inhibited them from violence?” Gareth asked, making sure he had understood all the previous explanations.
“For the most part,” Xiomber chimed in. “We’re all bound up into a single, psionic entity. That’s what the Accord of Souls is all about. Empathy. But some folks feel it more and some less. Those individuals who are at the low end tend to become criminals, like us.”
“And we’re completely outside of your empathy, so Cinnra wanted a human as an assassin,” Gareth completed the thought. “Except I’m a police officer. A Field Agent with Earth Force Sky Patrol. The good guys. Shouldn’t we be contacting a Vanir Constable to help them?”
“Pal, if they could stop Maximus Sarzynski, we already would have turned ourselves in and turned state’s evidence. They got no chance in hell of stopping that guy. That’s why we needed you.”
“So now I’m a hunted criminal,” Gareth observed. “And I’m supposed to help two other wanted criminals stop an entire gang of wanted criminals from taking over the galaxy?”
“You got it, pal,” Xiomber cracked wise, leaning back into his seat.
“Who the hell do you think I am?” Gareth rasped.
“A hero,” Morty replied in deadly seriousness.
Gareth slammed his mouth shut when it fell open. Scowled hard, but the Yuudixtl scientist was immune to his look.
And the little lizardman was right. That was all he had ever wanted to be.
A hero.
The Arsenal
Professor Loughty made sure everyone else stayed at the door, including his daughter Philippa. Given his druthers, she wouldn’t even be here, but his headstrong, only, daughter was not one to be easily thwarted. Especially not when her beau was the one that had disappeared.
Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, already thought of Gareth as his son-in-law. The young man had pressed his case early on, and then spent several years reminding Royston and Philippa of his love. But nobody and nothing could crack that man’s hard head that he had to be promoted to the rank of Field Agent before he would formally propose. And Royston had tried every trick he could think of over the years.
Worse, he had known that Gareth was all prepared to finally propose, but Royston couldn’t tell Pip that. She was already on the verge of tears, standing in the doorway with a fist to her mouth, the short, red shirt and tunic of a Sky Patrol Auxiliary reminding everyone how tough she was.
Royston smiled at his daughter as his portable scanner went to work. She had her mother’s red hair and green eyes, rather than his own darker complexion, but Pippa had gotten her height from him, as well as his bones, in comparison to his dear-departed Elizabeth.
However, Pip had had gotten Elizabeth’s strength, and her force of will, which served the young woman well, both in dealing with Gareth and her father, and also with society in general. The world frowned on a woman of science, such as Pip had become. She had earned her university degree, but no college would admit her to higher studies, so he had brought her with him to Earth Force’s Headquarters in orbit where she had met and fallen madly in love with a rising agent.
Who had just vanished.
Royston would have considered the entire thing to be an elaborate practical joke, even after listening to the audio tapes of Gareth’s last call, except that the portable scanner kept returning bizarre radiation signatures, no matter how he tuned it. Nothing dangerous or he would have never allowed his only daughter in here regardless of her impending engagement to the man in question.
No, just strange. Nothing he could explain, and he was Earth Force’s preeminent expert on stellar radiation.
Something must have shown on his face.
“What is it, Father?” Pippa asked in a serious voice that still could have filled opera halls with its musicality, had she been of the mind.
“Sir?” Sector Marshal Alvin Siddall asked from over Pippa’s shoulder from the hallway.
Royston found it amusing that the commander of The Arsenal itself was so deferential, but the situation was well outside anything Earth Force had ever encountered. That was why he had called in Royston. Plus, it had been Gareth. Everyone knew about that connection.
“There is something here,” Royston admitted. “I cannot explain it. However, I can see it, and thus, it must exist and be explainable. Seal the room off for now. I will need to return with better equipment.”
“Where is he?” Siddall asked. “Where could Gareth go?”
Royston drew himself up fully. Like the Sector Marshal, he was over six feet tall. Unlike the other man, Royston was only a little pudgy around middle and not turning fat like the man who spent too much time behind a desk.
“I don’t know, Marshal Siddell, Pippa,” he acknowledged them both, especially the depths of fear in Philippa’s eyes. “Nothing I know can explain a man just vanishing like that. But I will find out.”
Disguised
Gareth looked around the strange office where the flying taxi had deposited them. The room was large and airy, but mostly empty, except for a few racks of clothes near one gray wall and a couple of triple mirrors standing in the back corner on his right, plus a pair of blue couches in the middle.
Still, Morty seemed at home, and Xiomber as well. Both took seats on the one couch and gestured Gareth to the other.
Outside, the taxi dove out of sight and the balcony door closed, sealing them off from the cotton-candy skies of Orgoth Vortai.
“Welcome,” a disembodied, male voice filled the oversized room. “What’ll it be, Morty, Xiomber? You two finally ready to dress better?”
Gareth had to agree with the voice. Both lizardmen were wearing something rough equivalent to common dungarees in blue, with pull-over T-shirts, Xiomber’s in black and Morty’s red with the strange design on the front. Gareth felt desperately overdressed in his Field Agent uniform. The two lizardmen dressed like a couple of machinists out for a beer after work.
“Nothing so grand, Jorghen,” Morty called back. “And I sure as hell wouldn’t have you do my wardrobe. Need to make the Vanir here look less memorable. His name’s Gareth.”
Vanir? Oh, right. Not human. Short Vanir. That’s the cover story. I can do that.
“Gareth?” the man asked. “Stand up and walk to the mirrors on your right.”
Gareth did, nervous, but not too much. Socially awkward, maybe.
His image came back in triplicate from the nine-foot-tall mirrors. A light flashed in his eyes, and the image in the reflection was suddenly wearing black pants, baggy enough that they covered his boots instead of tucking in. The Sky Patrol tunic was gone, as well. In its place, a plain, white t-shirt, underneath a button-down, button-up shirt in Sky Patrol plaid colors. A jacket appeared over top of that after a moment, blue denim like the Yuudixtl pair’s pants, with bronzed buttons and a small SP button stuck through the flap of the left breast pocket.
Hey, that wasn’t bad looking.
“Why not just take him to a department store?” Jorghen’s disembodied voice came from all around a moment later.
“He gets self-conscious, shopping in the kids section, Jorghen,” Morty fired back. “You, of all people, should appreciate that.”
Jorghen had a crude laugh. Ugly. The bully at school picking on the other kids, at least until Gareth put a stop to it. But discretion was still called for here.
“You like that, Gareth?” Jorghen asked. “The fashion’s a little offbeat, but that’s what your subconscious wanted.”
Gareth turned a nervous eye to the two Yuudixtl scientists. Morty nodded. So did Xiomber.
“Yeah,” Gareth admitted.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had dressed as a civilian. It had to be before he went off to school, ten years ago. The guy in the mirror looked like a cowboy, in the good ways. Like maybe if he added a hat, he could star in Westerns. Add a seven point star and he could be the town marshal.
“Okay,” Jorghen said. “Take me about thirty minutes to kick it out. You leaving the other outfit here?”
Gareth panicked. Give up my Field Agent uniform? Never.
“Uhm, no,” he settled for, rather than unleashing a blistering stream of the sorts of profanities he had first learned from the enlisted Chief on his first command.
“Put it on my account, Jorghen,” Morty said. “And spin him up a set of formal robes, as well. Something High Street, but without all the flash of an investment banker. Low profile, as it were. We need to be able to eat at a fancy restaurant with a dress code.”
“Add about ten minutes then,” the man said. “Coming right up. Have some tea while you wait.”
Gareth thought about it, but he really needed to pee. More tea would make it worse.
Instead, he leaned close the two criminals.
“Uhm, I need to use the facilities,” he whispered.
“Through there,” Xiomber pointed.
“But…”
“Erect bipeds, Gareth,” Morty said. “Same design. Find the target at your height. Simple as that.”
Gareth blushed and nodded.
When he got up this morning, peeing in an alien toilet was not anywhere on his list of things to consider. Still, he was Sky Patrol. He could do this.
The door opened easy enough. A counter with a mirror and a sink on the left. Stalls and urinals on the right. A red light came on as he stepped close to one.
Motion sensor.
Still, he managed, even with all the extra publicity. It flushed itself as he backed up and looked around.
There were no handles on the faucet.
None.
He got lucky and it went off when he passed a hand underneath.
Huh.
That was smart.
Out in the main room, the boys were sipping more tea. Gareth passed, for now. There was enough caffeine in his system for one day. And it was close to midnight, back on Earth. He would need to sleep soon.
In fact, the couch looked comfortable. He sat down, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
“Wake up, sleepy head,” a merry voice intruded. “You need to change and put your stuff in the bag.”
Gareth climbed out of his bizarre dreams, into his bizarre reality. Hopefully this one was better.
He really didn’t want to see a tentacled cow again. Like, ever.
The outfit from the mirror was hanging on hooks next to the mirror itself. Quickly, Gareth transformed himself into an Undercover Agent working a deep mission. A cowboy, even. The boots were wrong, but hopefully none of the locals would notice.
The Field Agent uniform got folded up exactly to regulation and put away, atop a piece of fabric that appeared to be a thick, soft black silk, shot through with red and cream glitter. It was the most beautiful piece of fabric he had ever seen.
“Thank you, sir,” Secret Agent Gareth said to the room as he picked up and bag and slung the strap over his shoulder.
“Any time, Gareth,” Jorghen said. “It’s interesting, watching the machines locate the clothes you want to wear, as opposed to what society would inflict on a short Vanir.”
“Let’s go,” Morty groused. “Time’s wasting.”
Out the door and onto the balcony. Another taxi settled in and opened for them. Gareth followed the little men into the cabin and leaned back, seatbelts in place.
“Now what?” he asked sleepily.
“Now we’ve got a little bit of a jaunt,” Morty said. “Why don’t you sleep for now, and we’ll wake you up when we get there.”
“I could never…” Gareth began to say as the day caught up with him and darkness descended.
Constable Baker
“You have got to be kidding,” Constable Eveth Baker rasped into the telephonetics handset as she furiously wrote notes into an old-fashioned, leather-bound notebook with an even older-fashioned pencil.
The written word calmed her. Words on a page, rather than a screen, somehow rearranged themselves in her imagination to create new links between clues that she didn’t think about consciously.
“Fine,” she continued. “But you better be right, or the weekly stipend we pay you for these sorts of leads just might dry up.”
Eveth slammed the handset down angrily and looked around the police bullpen where she was working. The space always felt dingy in her memory, when she wasn’t here, but the room itself was clean and spacious. Well designed for calming psychology. It was just her that wanted it to reflect some of the squalor of the job.
Across the shared desk, her partner looked up from his reading with studied casualness. Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray was a by-the-book cop. The old man of the precinct they had paired her with in an effort to tone down some of the crazier things Eveth knew she did when pursuing the criminal element.
He was tall for a Vanir male, more than seven foot, two inches in stocking feet, but skinny. The man weighed barely three hundred pounds. Grodray was an intellectual cop. Divorced with two kids in school. Forty One Standard Cycles old, the light brown hair on his temples was turning gray now, and while he might have lost a step in a footrace, the Senior Constable had gotten that much better at outsmarting the bad guys so he never had to chase them down.
And he had Eveth, if it came to that. She liked pursuing criminals who thought they could get away.
Even his uniform tunic somehow conveyed the image of a staid academic, well-tailored to his overall shape with the bright, cerulean-blue ring of the Accord of Souls over his heart. Hers were always wrinkly and dusty, but that was the time she spent crawling under desks and into dark corners looking for clues.
“Something interesting?” her partner asked in a quiet, droll voice.
The room was mostly empty this afternoon. Quiet, save for a drunk snoring loudly in a cage in one corner of the office. Everyone else was out doing things, so they had almost the entire floor almost to themselves right now.
“One of my secret informers,” Eveth shrugged and took a calming breath. Getting emotional with Grodray never did any good. The man was deduction, boiled down and decanted into a glass bottle. Emotions just washed off his narrow, sturdy chest like rain. “Usually, the man’s reliable. This time, he claims that they heard rumors of a human, of all things, running loose on Orgoth Vortai, right here in Punarvasu.”
“Again?” Grodray asked. “Haven’t we had enough of these wild goose chases?”
“Get this,” Eveth said. “Completely different description, this time. A pretty detailed one, at that.”
She relayed everything off of her notepad slowly, letting her partner digest the words. He was all about processing things like a prospector seeking gold flakes. Swirl the water slowly, let it settle, add some more water, swirl some more. Eventually, the good stuff would settle to the bottom of the pan, once all the dross was removed.
Something caught her eye as she repeated it. Intuition snuck in and bit her on the ear, like it did.
“What?” Grodray asked as he realized she had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.
Eveth turned her attention to the keyboard on the desk before her and typed furiously.
Suddenly, the screen flashed bright red and a beep chimed angrily at her.
WARNING. Information classified. Enter Level-7 security authorization to proceed.
“Fardel,” she grumbled angrily under her breath.
A Constable like her was only Level-3.
“What are you trying to do, Baker?” he asked warily, standing and walking around towards her side of the desk.
She showed him the description of the clothing the human was supposedly wearing, written hurriedly as the informer had spoken.
“See?” she asked. “Red jacket. Black and gold design on the chest. I was trying to look something up about the humans that I thought I remembered, but the system wants a Level-7 clearance. Not worth trying to ask a Senior Inspector. They’ll just tell me I’m imagining things.”
“What are you imagining, Eveth?” Jackeith questioned quietly.
“A uniform,” she said, flipping back through her notebook unsuccessfully. “Or something. It was part of a throwaway line that one Inspector made, back when they briefed us about humans during the first scare, last winter. Damn it, this notebook is too new. I’ll have to look it up when I get home tonight.”
“Here,” Grodray said, leaning over her shoulder and typing something into the keyboard.
The screen flashed a welcome and brought up an image of a Vanir male. Except it wasn’t. This was a human.
And Jackeith Grodray had typed his password into…
“How in the nine hells did you do that?” she stared up at him in surprise. “That was a Level-7 authorization.”
“Uh huh,” he smiled back serenely. Like always.
“But you’re only a Senior Constable,” she continued, confused and maybe a little frustrated. “That should only grant you Level-4, maybe Level-5 at best.”
“I only ever wanted to be a Senior Constable, Eveth,” he answered calmly. “Plus, I had to do some things several years ago. This was back before we were partners. They had to read me in on some very dangerous secrets.”
Eveth flushed with a moment of pure avarice at the thought of the crimes you could solve with that level of clearance.
“So what have we got?” Grodray continued, still serene, damn it.
Eveth pointed at the screen, going back and forth between her notes and the image.
“White pants,” she observed. “Check. Dark red tunic with weird gold things on the shoulders. Check. Black background a foot wide, center of chest, with some weird logo in gold in the middle. Check. The description also included three white rings around the black, separated by red lines.”
“Three, you said?” he asked in a voice suddenly gone cold and stern.
She looked up again, feeling her face harden. It matched Jackeith’s in that.
“Yes, three,” she replied. “What’s going on, Grodray?”
She watched him call up a menu item quickly and toggle something. The image changed, and now the chest had three rings around the black.
“The thing in the middle are two letters, Baker,” he said carefully, glancing up to make sure they were still alone in the room. “From the principle language on Earth. SP. Stands for Sky Patrol. Part of the Earth Force that humans have over their single solar system.”
“A military?” she asked, suddenly scrambling to her feet. She needed to be out on the streets, if there really was a human, a warrior, loose in this city.
“No,” Grodray placated her with one hand and a calm voice. “That’s the uniform of an Earth Force Sky Patrol Field Agent, Baker.”
“Meaning?” she asked.
“He’s a cop, like us.”
Underworld
“What do we know?” Marc asked harshly as the two Warreth females entered his personal chambers.
He generally didn’t like dragging everyone into the throne room, except for special occasions. That kept the mystique going. This was business.
“Got a lead, but we’ve got a problem, Maximus,” Maiair replied.
They were sisters, Maiair and Yooyar. Primarily crimson in their feathers, with black and white highlights. Maiair was taller, but only slightly, and a year older.
Yooyar was probably the more dangerous of the two, however, the older sister was the cannier opponent.
“What happened?” Marc asked, moving across the outer chamber to grab a bottle of wine.
It wasn’t worth making a scene with these two. They were loyal, and could be lethal if he needed to point them at someone needing to be disciplined. He grabbed a glass and poured some wine into it while he listened.
“Morty and Xiomber indeed found themselves a human,” Maiair said. “The description fits.”
“Where?” Marc looked up as the glass was full. He didn’t bother offering any to the sisters. They wouldn’t be here long enough to drink any, and this wasn’t a social call.
“Orgoth Vortai,” the older sister replied. “Witness puts them in Punarvasu a couple of days ago, but they’ve gone dark.”
“They’re on the run,” Marc said. “They can’t get far.”
“Somebody made the human,” Yooyar interjected. “The Constabulary got a tip. We’ve spotted a pair of cops in the place where Morty and Xiomber were confirmed.”
Marc swirled the glass and sniffed the bouquet as he thought. Suddenly becoming a genius was incredibly useful if he needed to solve a math or physics problem, but not in the messy, complicated tides that represented the street. Still, he could use this to his advantage.
“Follow the cops,” he decided. “Keep an eye out for the two traitors and the human, but let the cops do the leg work. If we get lucky, they’ll flush the trio for us and we can swoop in. If not, they’ll all end up in a cell somewhere and we can take care of them.”
“Second problem, boss,” Maiair said. “We’ve been down in the lab. Morty cooked everything good. Sabotaged the controllers to fry all the panels when they completed the jump. Plus, about half the generators overloaded and functionally melted.”
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“Fixable,” she replied. “But it will take time to build a whole new, completely-illegal, wormhole generator. Plus, if the authorities are jumpy about humans being around, someone is going to be looking at all the parts vendors, wondering who brought him here. If we suddenly buy a lot of gear, it’s likely to show up on someone’s radar.”
“Understood,” he said. “If the cops do catch them, one of those two shits are likely to offer us up as a way to either cut their sentence, or make sure that we end up in the same cell with them.”
“So what do we do?” Maiair asked.
“Let’s get ahead of the curve,” he replied, taking a drink as he cycled down all the branches of the new decision tree faster than anyone he had ever met could match. “Keep together the hard core of the organization. Just the twenty or so we’ll need for action. Have everyone else go to ground as fast as you can shut this facility down. Assume a police raid in five minutes and wipe everything. Put the A-team on the transport and get us jumped over to Orgoth Vortai as a tour group.”
“Why there?” Yooyar asked.
Warreth didn’t have a mouth that could be used to communicate emotions, like humans did. They used the feathered headcrest instead. The younger sister was confused, but that was inexperience. She had only joined the organization barely long enough ago to meet Cinnra, before Marc supplanted the old boss. She and her sister had understood which way the winds were blowing.
She was trying to figure out which way he was moving, so she didn’t put a foot wrong, rather than challenging his authority. Learning, which was good. There were still a few of Cinnra’s people he would need to ease out.
Or arrange lethal accidents for.
“There is no place better than anyplace else,” he explained. “But they’re likely to run, so we need to be in a position to give chase. Either them or the cops. This is about being close enough to force their decision curve the way we want it.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding firmly.
She didn’t understand, but Marc expected her sister to fill in the details once they left.
He nodded them out and drank more wine.
Having Sky Patrol here changed things. The cops just might listen, if they knew what Dankworth really represented, and Sky Patrol wouldn’t give up on their prey.
He should know. Packed carefully away, he still had his old uniform.
Witness for the Prosecution
“You’re sure?” Eveth asked the Borren publican of the tea house, pointing at the picture in Grodray’s hands.
She and Grodray had ended up back in the office with the tea house keeper. It was a tiny space with high ceilings and little art on the walls. The door was open, but that just let them see back into the kitchen, rather than the public space.
They had printed the image of a Sky Patrol Field Agent, minus all the explanations of what the thing actually was, but even then, it was never allowed out of Grodray’s immediate control.
“Indeed, officer,” the man said, tapping the chest. “The design was quiet interesting. I have considered doing it as a piece of art. Could I get a copy of that?”
“No,” Grodray said with quiet emphasis. “In fact, if you were to put it up, Accord Security might take exception. I’d rather your shop not be shut down for potentially-criminal behavior. What say you?”
“Oh,” the man said.
Eveth watched the manager blush, which was always interesting on one of the Borren. They were the standard biped design, but exceptionally tall, often nearing eight feet in the male, and over seven for a female. But they were also stick-thin. At a full six-foot-seven, Eveth probably outweighed the man, despite only coming up to his shoulder.
The eyes were large, compared to most species, with a long, flat, narrow nose, and a tiny mouth, but it allowed them to see in far lower light than most species.
And they were pacifists, as a rule. Great shopkeepers, though.
He leaned back as politely as he could, putting emotional space between himself in comfortable robes, and Eveth and her partner.
“And they left after an hour?” Eveth pressed, raising her voice just enough to keep the shopkeeper’s attention.
“Indeed,” he agreed. “Keelee served them, and they left a good tip.”
Eveth turned to look back to the kitchen.
“Keelee,” she said in a loud voice at the few employees lingering and probably listening.
One of them looked up in shock, while the others edged away. She was a young Grace. Her tentacles still weren’t to their full growth yet, so not that long out of school. She turned utterly umber under the force of Eveth’s gaze.
“Join us?” Eveth ordered in a polite fiction that only sounded like a question.
She had left her jacket in the car today, so her armored bodysuit with the badge over her heart was obvious. Normally, a nice tunic covered it with softer lines, but today, the harshness of the blue-gray scales stood out. As did the knee-high armored boots, the holster on her hip, and the utility belt normally hidden under the tunic. Eveth had tied back her hair, but the bangs needed to be cut. She blew one up to clear her eyes.
Next to her, Grodray still had his jacket on. It made him look diplomatic.
Eveth was here to play bad cop.
Keelee shuffled over, head hanging and tentacles nearly motionless with embarrassment. The rest of the employees made themselves scarce.
Eveth caught the girl under the chin with her right hand, lifted the face up to look at her. A few tentacles carefully explored Eveth’s suit, but none made it as far as her hand.
“Two Yuudixtl, and a small Vanir?” Eveth pressed, pointing at the picture. “The Vanir dressed like this?”
“Yes, sir,” Keelee answered quietly.
If anything, the young woman’s blush got worse. She nearly turned brown and her pupils dilated.
Eveth played a hunch.
“Did you taste the Vanir, Keelee?” she asked quietly.
That was frequently a major faux pas with strangers. But if he was what Grodray thought, then the stranger might not know any better.
“Girl?” the manager bellowed.
Eveth silenced the man with a hard glance. After a moment, she stepped out of the doorway to the manager’s office and pulled it shut it behind her. The Senior Constable could keep him in line.
And Grodray was a guy. He might not understand.
“You can tell me, Keelee,” Eveth said carefully. “They’re fugitives from justice, but you had no way of knowing that.”
“I did, sir,” the young woman said.
Her head would have fallen, but for Eveth holding it up. Having more than a foot of height, and the muscles to match, helped.
“What did he taste like?” Eveth asked, disguising her tone as well as she could.
Keelee didn’t need to hear Eveth’s disgust.
Some species knew no bounds, but Eveth had never considered anyone that wasn’t a Vanir. And precious few of them.
Most men were either too timid around her, or too competitive.
But Keelee had stopped breathing.
Eveth nodded.
“He wasn’t a Vanir, was he?” she asked.
“No, sir,” the girl said. “I’ve never tasted anyone like him. So warm. So purple. So dreamy.”
Shit, they really did have a human on the run in the Accord of Souls. And a witness.
“You can never tell anyone about him, Keelee,” Eveth said. “Except me or the Senior Constable in the office. Not your family. Not your coworkers. Not your boss. If you did, and I found out, someone would have to arrest you and probably put you in jail for decades.”
It was a serious threat. Eveth Baker was a serious cop making it. And a decade sounded like forever when you were twenty.
“Do you understand me, Keelee?” Eveth asked, trying to be reasonable while firm.
“Yes, sir,” Keelee said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I had to find a way to taste him.”
Huh.
“Have you ever been that way before?” Eveth asked.
“No, sir,” Keelee wailed quietly. “I’ve always been a good girl. I’m still a virgin.”
“Well stay away from that creature and you’ll be safe, Keelee,” Eveth instructed. “Find yourself a good boy or girl of the Grace and make art instead.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’ve done well, Keelee,” Eveth reassured her. “Now we know where to start, so we can find them. But you need to keep our secret. Can I trust you?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Keelee brightened.
Eveth sent her on her way and knocked on the closed door.
The Grace were all about art. Being able to see, touch, taste, and smell with those tentacles meant they lived in the richest sensory world possible.
Eveth figured she’d go nuts in a hurry, surrounded by that level of sensory bombardment, all day every day, but she wasn’t an artist. Nothing like the Grace.
No, that wasn’t true. She did have an art. A passion.
Hunting down criminals and bringing them to justice.
The Senior Constable emerged a moment later, shooting the manager a significant look that probably mirrored what was on Eveth’s face. Perhaps a touch more refined and polite, but no less adamantine.
She nodded and headed for the front of the shop.
Out on the sidewalk, the sun was pleasantly warm, but not enough so that Jackeith would remove his jacket.
“What did the girl tell you?” he asked as they got some privacy.
The uniforms ensured that. The Constabulary were the Accord’s police. There were other, more dangerous agencies, hidden deeper in the shadows cast by the cops, but most people still gave them a wide berth. Eveth assumed everyone was guilty of something, however small, and could use that as leverage. She was rarely wrong.
“She confirms we have a human on our hands,” Eveth said. “Alien of a type she had never tasted, anyway. I didn’t tell her what he was. The manager confirmed the uniform, so we know what we’re dealing with. Where do we go from here?”
“Cinnra’s organization were the ones behind the last human scare,” Grodray mused. “But he’s no longer in the picture, according to some sources. One theory was that he did manage to recruit a human.”
“So did some other underworld organization decide to engage in an arms race?” Eveth asked. “Get their own human? But could they get a worse target than a human cop, Jackeith?”
“Maybe it wasn’t random luck on their part?” he contemplated. “Maybe it was intentional?”
“Are you nuts, Grodray?”
“Let’s employ deduction,” he began.
Eveth knew to shut up at those words. Anything she said trying to derail her partner now would just extend the conversation that much longer. He would not be budged. Not when he got like this.
She nodded, trying not to hustle him or roll her eyes.
“Suppose Cinnra got himself a human, an assassin,” Grodray pondered. “And lost control of the creature, since a human killer wouldn’t necessarily only kill the people Cinnra wanted.”
“Speculation, but sure,” Eveth injected into the spot she was supposed to say something.
“And the human killed Cinnra,” Jackeith continued. “That explains some of the upheavals and shenanigans we’ve had to deal with on various worlds. Turf war and maybe a new boss shaking things up.”
“With you so far.”
Without a single eyeroll, even.
“Who would want a human cop?” Grodray posed the million-credit question.
“Someone in Cinnra’s band of criminals who wants to cover his ass?” Eveth guessed. “They would be the only sort of people who would know how to get a human, outside of some very shadowy agencies that would have never let one run around unchaperoned. And they might want someone who wanted to take the first human down, and had the human violence to do it.”
“Holds water, Eveth,” he said.
“Fardel,” she replied. “That means we’ve got a potential race war on our hands. Two uncontrolled killers, gunning for each other, with a whole Accord worth of innocents potentially in the way.”
“Worse,” her partner noted. “I’m not sure we can tell anyone, with as flimsy as our evidence is. And if we do, they’ll take it away from us in a heartbeat.”
“You want to take Cinnra’s gang down as hard as I do?” Eveth pressed.
“Probably more, Baker,” he replied. “I know things about those bastards than you do not.”
Eveth wanted to ask. So desperately wanted to know the truth. It probably included an explanation of how her partner, a lowly Senior Constable, managed a security clearance at least as high as a Senior Inspector.
But she didn’t dare ask. If they trusted him that much, he had no choice but to keep quiet.
Eveth wanted that level of trust placed in her by those same people, one of these days.
First, she had to take down at least one human genocide machine.
Maybe two.
Travelers
“Where are we?” Gareth asked, still a little fuzzy from his nap. They had apparently let him sleep a while. The sun was down.
“In orbit, aboard a ferry,” Xiomber replied.
“Oh,” Gareth said.
And then his brain woke up with a strangled cry.
In orbit? But there were no rockets firing to wake the dead. No high-thrust run at five G’s to clear the atmosphere, on the way to an orbital rendezvous with Sky Patrol Headquarters or The Arsenal.
He leaned as far forward as his seatbelt would allow and stared out the window.
Sure enough, deep space stared back.
“How?” he turned to Morty, eyes as big as grapefruits.
“The taxi took us to the ferry terminal,” the Yuudixtl scientist explained. “From there, a commercial wormhole bounce to orbit. In a few minutes, we’ll debark at the terminal and walk aboard a tube ferry and hop over to Hurquar.”
“That’s a planet?”
“That’s a planet, Gareth,” Morty reassured him. “Primarily Yuudixtl, with a bunch of Vanir and Elohynn, so we’ll just kind of vanish into the crowd.”
“Then what?”
“Then we talk about upgrading you to take on Maximus and save the galaxy,” Xiomber said firmly.
Gareth turned to look at the other brother. He wasn’t sure what upgrade entailed, but if that was the only way to stop Marc Sarzynski, then so be it.
Some sacrifices were always worth making.
The taxi rotated and Gareth found himself staring at the side of a gorgeous space station. It was a long torus design, a tall donut with a hole in the middle, slowly rotating as he watched.
Gareth finally realized he was in zero-g, floating but for the seatbelt holding him in place. The taxi puffed suddenly and began to ease into line with hundreds of other, similar vehicles, headed into a port in the side of the station.
Inside, the taxi reversed course suddenly and flew along the mildly-inclined deck until it found a little dock and slipped in, like an egg in a carton. Heavy, metal hands grasped the sides and a small airlock door extended.
The hatch gull-winged up and Gareth followed the two brothers into a hallway long enough that he could see the curve of the station at the upward horizon, feeling like no cowboy he had ever seen.
But he looked good.
Women’s heads turned as he walked through the thin crowds, all headed towards a stairwell.
Gareth heard Xiomber whisper to Morty as they walked.
“When this is done, I got a couple of long cons we need to run, using our boy here,” the lizard chuckled.
Morty joined in with him. Gareth blushed. He would be in their debt, if they helped him bring Maximus to justice.
And they had talked about doing a little swindle, so that he could help pay them back for giving up everything. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?
Assuming they all managed to not be in jail when it was done.
Up a deck, Morty led them to a private booth, well off in a corner.
“Get in, sit down, shut up,” Morty ordered. “I’m going to go get us some food.”
“Everything good?” Xiomber asked.
“I thought getting him new clothes would make the guy less memorable,” Morty shot back. “Shows what I know about women.”
“I know how little you know about dames, buddy,” Xiomber cracked. “Grab us some dim sum. I’ll keep Gareth safe from bands of horny chicks.”
Morty sighed and closed the door.
“Now what?” Gareth asked again.
He had a feeling he would be saying that a lot.
“In about thirty or forty-five minutes, the ferry will drop into a wormhole and we’ll emerge on Hurquar,” Xiomber said. “Not sure who he talked to or where we’re going, but Morty’s got connections everywhere.”
“Why not take a personal wormhole?” Gareth asked. “Like you did me?”
“Because those are extremely illegal, highly dangerous, and incredibly expensive to operate,” Xiomber replied. “If you managed to accidentally cross-connect two of them, you might vaporize half a hemisphere. Cinnra was desperate enough to build one in order to get Maximus. Morty and I were desperate enough to get you. Plus, we blew that one up when we left. And everyone travels commercial. Established corridors and times. Safe and comfortable. Was your first trip comfortable?”
Gareth shut his mouth. Xiomber didn’t need to know about him screaming like a little girl lost in the forest.
“No,” Gareth admitted. “Not really.”
“Yeah, and multiply that by hundreds of inhabited worlds,” Xiomber replied. “So everyone’s inside a big, safe ferry with no outside windows unless they want to go to the observation deck.”
“Huh,” Gareth said. “But we’re still going to stop Maximus?”
“Pal, we’re going to try.”
Hurquar
It had been a different taxi that took them to the surface of the new planet. Gareth had been awake this time, to follow the reverse process. Undock from the little egg carton, join the stream of vehicles splitting into five different groups, apparently to transfer to five cities down on the surface.
Morty had opaqued most of the the windows, but left one for Gareth to watch.
He felt like a golden retriever allowed in the car on a winter day, nose against the glass and tail wagging.
Into a cubical zone marked by eight satellites the size of small space stations. Park briefly. Flash of gold as they rode into a hole in space.
The tube was a short ride, compared to coming here from Earth, but that made sense. How many light centuries, compared to fractions of a light second?
The sky over Olehmmishqu was closer to the blue Gareth expected. Still a little too green, and there were two small moons visible on the horizon when he looked.
The ground looked like a city.
Well, no.
On earth, the cities were either really old and organic in shape, or more modern and square as a rule.
Olehmmishqu was built on a series of interconnected hexagons. Xiomber had produced a pocketcomm and let Gareth spend most of the trip reading about the Moisa. All he could think of to compare them to was a giant praying mantis, with four arms (two primary, two delicate), and six legs coming off of a very short abdomen, like a weird centaur or something.
They built hexagonally, in memory of the great nests they had established before being uplifted.
Gareth had a hard time imagining a flightless bumblebee, but that was sort of the niche they had filled on Ticcia and brought with them into the galaxy, like at Hurquar.
They apparently made fantastic architects. Gareth could see that, looking down at the various buildings, laid out like a map from above. The towers and such were every shape under the rainbow, and every color he’d ever considered. Or something like that.
This was all still a little weird, even for a Field Agent of the Sky Patrol.
But eventually, the taxi brought them to the roof of a mid-sized building, kinda sorta near the south(?) edge of town. It was cold up here. Gareth was glad he had the denim jacket, although he would need something heavier if they got into winter on some planet.
And a raincoat.
This was an advanced, galactic civilization. Couldn’t they do something about weather control?
The elevator wasn’t a box. It was a hollow tube. Morty stepped into air like a coyote accidentally running off a cliff chasing a road runner.
“Level forty-seven,” he said and then vanished.
“You next,” Xiomber prompted.
Gareth peeked over the edge of the hole to see a rapidly-receding Yuudixtl scientist.
Sure. Free-fall and trust the building to catch you. What happens if the power goes out?
Gareth gulped. He had an audience, and this was no time to ask for a stairwell. He gritted his teeth and stepped forward.
Something held his foot, but he didn’t dare look down to see what.
Just pretend you know what you’re doing.
“Level forty-seven,” he said, maybe a little louder than necessary.
He plummeted, but there was no feeling of wind. It was like he was in his own, little cocoon. Thirty-three stories raced by faster than he could count, and then he was magically standing on the deck, next to Morty.
The little lizard’s knowing grin broke the ice around Gareth’s soul.
“Fun?” Morty asked.
“Efficient,” Gareth countered, thinking back to the times he had to take a lot of stairs because there were too many people trying to use too few elevators.
When he got home, he was going to have to find a way to invent these elevators. Or hire a Moisa architect to rebuild The Arsenal.
Xiomber was there a moment later, grinning as well.
Huh. Yuudixtl didn’t really have lips like humans did. The grin was there in the eyes and the way the skin around them pulled tight and folded in. And the jaw dropped open just a shade.
Maybe he had spent enough time around the brothers to understand the non-verbal communication better. It had been two and a half days now.
Or maybe the magic PBJ sandwich was still modifying his brain. There was always that.
Morty suddenly walked forward, drawing the other two into his wake.
Gareth squinted at the writing on the door where they stopped, and suddenly the letters transformed into something he could read.
Biomimetics Heavy Southern Industries LLKR didn’t make any sense, though. Maybe a cultural thing?
Morty went in, so Gareth followed, through a boring reception area into a bigger space.
Now this was a mad scientist lab. Beakers, burners, racks of tubes arranged on black, heavy workbenches. It even smelled mad, with that cloying hint of ammonia he always associated with danger in a laboratory.
There was a Nari standing across one of the black-topped desks, writing on a white board with some sort of electronic pen. She was making adjustments to an animated image as he watched.
She turned, and locked eyes with Gareth. And smiled.
Gareth felt uncomfortable, like he was back at the teashop, but this one might not settle for just sniffing him.
“Heya, Talyarkinash,” Morty said, circling the tall desk.
The beautiful woman finally broke the stare and Gareth remembered to breathe. And start walking again.
Xiomber rolled his eyes when Gareth glanced down, but the little scientist kept quiet.
Hey, it wasn’t his fault.
“So what have you brought me this time, Morty?” Talyarkinash seemed to purr, glancing back in Gareth’s direction.
He stayed on this side of the big workbench, just in case.
She was just gorgeous, even if she was a bipedal lynx with upright ears and whiskers. Bright cobalt eyes complemented a resplendent pelt in what Gareth thought of as Imperial Blue. He had had a cat that silver-blue shade when he was young. He found himself clenching at the thought of this one also climbing into his lap and kneading.
She had that look in her eyes.
Yup, staying over here.
“Talyarkinash, this is Gareth Dankworth,” Morty introduced them, shaking her hand and then pointing.
Xiomber also got a polite shake.
Then she turned and stepped close enough to the workbench to hold out her hand.
Gareth took it gingerly, watching her nostrils flare and her eyes slit, just the tiniest amount.
“Already got a Nari girlfriend?” she asked.
Purred, maybe?
“Huh?” Gareth managed, losing himself in those deep eyes.
“Knock it off, Talyarkinash,” Morty chided her. “Random dame on the slidewalk literally handed him a scent card out of the blue yesterday. You still got it with you kid?”
“Huh?” Gareth managed to repeat. “Oh. Yeah.”
He pulled out his wallet and extracted the card, holding it up, but not out. It was his card and he was keeping it.
But he could smell the other woman’s perfume on it. Or her musk.
Uncomfortable here.
“So she doesn’t have a claim?” the cat woman asked silkily.
Claim?
“Uhm, not really?” Gareth supposed.
“Good,” Talyarkinash said. “So what can I do for you? Or to you?”
Gareth carefully stuck the card back in his wallet as an excuse to look down. He was sure his face had turned the color of his hidden uniform right now.
“So, you remember that project we hired you for, about five months ago?” Morty asked delicately.
“Sure,” the woman said. “You needed me to modify an alien. Brought me another one?”
Gareth did NOT like that gleam in her eyes when he looked up again. He held his breath and considered if he should just find a cop and try to explain everything, in spite of what the brothers had warned him would happen at that point.
He was not supposed to be a criminal. It went against everything Earth Force Sky Patrol stood for.
But he wasn’t a Field Agent here. No, this was time to be a Secret Agent.
Gareth held his calm. He hoped. The way her nostrils kept working suggested that she was studying him far closer than a casual acquaintance in a lab.
“Gareth is a human,” Xiomber said baldly.
That helped.
Talyarkinash stepped a whole pace back from her edge of the desk, and her ears rotated in different directions: one still pointed at Gareth, and the other now locking in on Morty.
Gareth felt better. Maybe she wasn’t about to make unusually-personal suggestions now.
“You brought one of them?” she snarled. “Here?”
“Another one,” Morty snapped back at the woman, reminding her.
She was twice Morty’s size, and really angry right now, but the two brothers almost looked like they were challenging her to say or do something stupid.
Who knew what a pair of Yuudixtl scientists could do against a Nari?
The woman retreated another step but otherwise held her ground. And her peace.
“Maximus is a human,” Morty continued. “Or was before you. I’m not sure quite what he is these days. You upgraded the physical to a Vanir. And Xiomber and I did the mental afterwards.”
“Bastards,” she hissed. “You brought a human into my lab? Do you want to get me shut down?”
“No,” Morty said. “I want your freaking help making Gareth here at least a match for Maximus, before that bastard takes over the whole criminal underworld, and then follows that up by taking over the entire Accord of Souls. You think that sort of thing’s going to help business?”
“You think a race war is going to help?” she snapped angrily. “Two them hunting each other through the planets? I might be shady, but I’m not going to be party to mass casualties of innocents, Morty. You can take your business elsewhere right now.”
“He’s a cop, Talyarkinash,” Xiomber added.
“And you brought a cop into my lab?” she growled. “What in the nine hells is wrong with you people?”
“It’s the only way to stop Maximus,” Morty said simply. “Nobody but a human has the necessary violent tendencies and lacks the psionic resonance of the Accord.”
“You’re a cop?” she sneered at him.
Gareth felt like she was sizing him up for a physical assault now, rather than an emotional one. But that was the sort of thing he could deal with.
Even if he had to let a woman hit him first. Hopefully, she wasn’t that strong.
It would probably still hurt.
“My name is Gareth St. John Dankworth,” he explained slowly, enunciating each syllable. “I am a Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol. Like Morty said, an officer of the law. Marc Sarzynski, the man you know as Maximus, is a renegade agent with a bounty on his head, back on Earth. And I will see him returned to Earth and brought to justice.”
“Back on Earth?” she scoffed, before turning to the two lizardmen. “You haven’t told him, have you?”
“Told me what?” Gareth felt his stomach go cold.
“No,” Morty said acidly. “We hadn’t. Not yet. That was supposed to come later, but I guess we’ll have to cover it now. Thank you, by the way.”
“I did owe you one, for bringing a cop in here.”
“Told me what?” Gareth focused on Morty and Xiomber now.
“No Earthman knows about the Accord of Souls, Gareth,” Morty explained. “Such knowledge is forbidden, because humans are the single most dangerous species known. But you’re here now, and you already know too much.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you can never return to Earth,” Xiomber said, possibly with a wistful trace.
Gareth felt his vision go gray. Something was wrong with his balance and both hands slammed heavily onto the top of workbench, catching his weight.
Never go home?
Never see his friends and crew again?
Never hold Philippa in his arms again? Unable to propose to her? Marry her? Start a happy life as man and woman?
For the briefest moment, rage threatened to overcome him. To make these two, these three, pay for what they had taken away from him forever.
Gareth sucked a breath deep into his soul and focused on the far wall.
The Nari woman had backed up another step, ears back and eyes showing white around the edges.
Gareth suspected he looked like all their worst nightmares brought to flesh before them. He certainly felt like it.
But Marc Sarzynski was here. Running loose in the wider galaxy. Who knew what terrible grief the universe would come to if that man wasn’t stopped.
And they had upgraded him, whatever that meant. These three people, he suspected, held all the guilt at such work.
What was it Xiomber had said? Only humans could be genetically engineered to go beyond the limits placed on everyone else by the Chaa?
Marc had always been a fantastic athlete back at Earth Forces Institute. He and Gareth frequently alternated first and second with everyone else vying for a distant third.
Academics had been the same way, with only three thousandths of a point finally separating them on graduation. It was one of the few times Gareth had actually been better, however thin that razor.
And then Deputy Agents with the Sky Patrol.
And Philippa.
She had chosen Gareth, and something had died in Marc Sarzynski. Turned him to darkness. Got him cast out of the Sky Patrol one short step ahead of his arrest.
And then he disappeared, until Gareth came that close to catching him in the process of breaking up a band of smugglers and slavers operating out of the UnderHives of Mars.
To apparently come here, to the Accord of Souls.
Gareth hoped it wasn’t all a fever dream leading his subconscious over the rainbow.
Another breath.
Gareth forced his fists to unclench, noting how nervous the two Yuudixtl were in addition to the Nari woman.
Yes, he was capable of devastating violence. They all were. It was part of what made humans what they were.
And why Earth Force needed the Sky Patrol.
“He’s here, and he must be stopped,” Gareth finally said heavily, eyeing each of them individually. “Whatever the cost.”
“Are you sure?” Xiomber asked. “We might could somehow try and erase a chunk of your memory instead, if we got lucky.”
“Whatever the cost,” Gareth repeated.
Part Two
Hunters
Examination
Gareth studied the secret lab Talyarkinash had taken him to. They had passed through a door hidden by a swinging bookcase, gone down a level, and entered into a smaller space that reminded him more of a dentist’s office than anything else.
The scents in here were almost nothing, layered over with floral hints and something subtle his brain kept wanting to interpret as Talyarkinash herself. Recessed lights filled the room with bright white illumination.
One wall was a glass window that felt heavy enough to stop bullets when Gareth had tapped it.
She and the two lizardmen had gone through another door and sealed it up tight behind them. They were on the other side of that glass now, watching him intently.
“First, I’ll need to scan you, Gareth,” the Nari woman said over a speaker. “Please make yourself comfortable in the chair and let it adjust itself to your body.”
Dentist chair. Mad Scientist Dentist’s chair.
Xiomber had said that a male Vanir could be over seven feet tall, with the females close behind. This chair would fit them.
For once, he actually felt rather like a juvenile Vanir, by comparison.
But he climbed in. Let the cold leather warm slowly against his back, with his jacket and flannel shirt hanging on a hook by the door. He had only the tight, white, t-shirt against the chill, but that cold was in his soul.
The air in the room was a pleasant seventy degrees.
Slowly, the chair moved. Gareth would have jumped up, but she had warned him.
It seemed to shrink under him, adjusting and accommodating until it fit like a hammock.
After a moment, it tilted itself back, giving Gareth a view of a device hanging from the ceiling that was in no way something so simple as the X-ray machine to take pictures of his teeth.
“Ready?” the woman asked nervously.
She sounded more emotional than he felt right this moment, but Gareth supposed she was expecting a Viking Berserker to break loose in her lab. He just needed to get this over with so he could go out and hunt down the man who had once been his fiercest rival.
And his best friend.
“Ready,” Gareth said.
“I’ll need to hold you in place while I scan you, Gareth,” she reminded him for the fourth time. “Tell me when you are comfortable.”
“Go ahead,” he called, holding all his emotions tight inside.
They were long since past the time to panic. Or to stop.
Gareth locked all his muscles as the dentist’s chair seemed to unfold itself a second time. Metal bars slid over his wrists and shins, binding them tight against the chair. Another strap crossed his chest, and a helmet lowered itself to cover most of his head, leaving only his mouth and part of his nose uncovered.
He wasn’t claustrophobic, but the feelings weren’t that far away right now.
“This is only supposed to tickle, Gareth,” she said over the intercom. “Please let me know if you start experiencing pain.”
“Will do,” he said.
Ants. Walking across his skin but not biting. The leaves of a weeping willow as he walked through them. The cool chill of a morning fog as he jogged around the track, back at the Institute, watching the sun come up higher on every lap.
A bright light passed through his eyelids and bored a tunnel into his mind like a three-quarter inch bit being driven by a three-quarter-horse-power motor.
Gareth ground his teeth together and refused to make a sound.
“Everything okay?” Xiomber asked. “Vital signs just jumped.”
“Sharp, but controllable,” Gareth called back, willing everything to stillness again. “Keep going.”
Hunt the man down. Bring him to justice, whatever that looked like here.
Whatever the cost.
The ants were biting now. Nasty, Texas fire ants pouring acid into his veins. The willow was a rose bush, slashing him with thorns. The fog was an icy pond he had just fallen into, through the ice.
Whatever the cost.
Something changed in his brain. The pain was there, but pushed to one side. He could think through it, or at least around it. Gareth focused his will, pushed, and the pulsing turned outward, as though he was somehow driving the drill bit backwards and closing the hole up, faster than the machine could tunnel.
Everything let go so suddenly Gareth thought he would pass out.
The pain was gone. The fire. The cold. Everything.
The chair let go and moved him more or less upright.
Gareth swung his feet over and stood up, only wobbling slightly.
“How are you doing in there?” Morty asked carefully.
“Headache,” he replied. “But it’s going away now.
“You had pain?” the woman asked. “It’s not supposed to do that.”
“I overcame it,” Gareth growled. “What’s next?”
“Come in here and we’ll watch the readouts,” she said. “It will only take a few minutes to process everything.”
The door unlocked noisily and swung open on silent hinges. Gareth stepped through into a sound studio.
One long console sat under the window, filled with hundreds of gauges, knobs, and sliders. Gareth had no idea what it all did, but he recognized the human outline on a large monitor beside the window.
The writing on the screen was mostly words he could make out, but Gareth was completely lost as to what they said.
He took a chair in a far corner and concentrated on breathing and reducing his heart rate.
It felt like he had just run from Marathon to Athens in a single instant.
A machine spit out a long strip of paper, clucking to itself like a hen.
Talyarkinash was studying the readout, holding it low enough for Morty and Xiomber to read it as well.
Someone whistled, low and startled.
Gareth looked up and studied the three scientists.
“Gareth,” she said carefully. “Where would you say you rank, in terms of expressed, human potential?”
It took him three tries to process her words into something that made sense.
“Probably near the top, in terms of mental, physical, and emotional,” he replied through his exhaustion. “Sky Patrol Institute is a grueling test that lasts four years. I graduated at the top of my class. Marc Sarzynski was a very close second.”
“You went to school together?” She was aghast.
“I told you that.”
“I thought that meant you knew of him,” she countered. “How close were you?”
“He would have been my best man at my wedding, one of these days,” Gareth said firmly. “Now I’ll see him buried under the jail, if it’s the last thing I do. Why?”
“So we scanned him then, but not to the level we just did with you,” Morty explained as the Nari woman fell mute. “Plus, I know roughly where we put him, so I was looking for what we could do to improve you. We’ll probably only get one shot to do it, and I want to get all we can. You’ll be facing both Maximus and the Constabulary at the same time. Neither will play nice.”
“So what did you learn?” Gareth felt some level of anxiety creep into his voice.
“It’s just that…” Morty’s voice tailed off.
Xiomber stepped up and gave Gareth a level gaze.
“What he’s trying to say, I presume diplomatically, is that you appear to be using fourteen percent of your expressed, genetic potential, Gareth,” Xiomber said. “For comparison sake, members of the Accord are generally fixed at right around ninety-eight percent. We can tinker with ourselves, but nothing significant.”
“Meaning?” Gareth asked. He was tired, sore, and his head hurt.
“Meaning we were able to turn Sarzynski into a genius-level Vanir, Gareth,” Talyarkinash explained. “But we stopped there because we apparently didn’t dream any bigger.”
Genius-level Vanir.
Seven feet tall. Three hundred, twenty-five pounds of hard muscle, trained to be as dangerous as an Agent of the Sky Patrol could be. With an IQ of two hundred.
And that was dreaming too small?
“How big should we dream?” Gareth finally asked.
The Arsenal
Royston pulled the ticker-tape readout from the side of his radiation scanner, made a note, and scrolled backwards on the tape nearly three feet to another set of results. Briefly he wondered if the radiation machine was broken.
Or if he had tuned it too sensitive and it was reacting to just the movement of the air at this point.
Except, Gareth’s room was the only place where the readings changed. Royston looked around, but nothing was out of the ordinary. The place was as standard and regulation as they came, which was to be expected of Gareth. His pocketcomm was still sitting on the desk, next to a book the young man had apparently been reading when the emergency happened. The bed tucked tight, except where he had pulled the covers slightly while sitting on them.
Uniforms all arranged in the drawers and closet exactly according to specification.
Royston had even scanned both chester and closet, on the possible chance that Gareth had brought something home with him from a recent mission, but nothing reacted.
No, the only time the machine pinged at all was when he pointed the detector at the telephone’s handset, or at a spot in the middle of the floor, almost in the center of the triangle between bed, dresser, and closet. And in both of those, the radiation reading went off the charts. It made no sense at all.
Royston turned the machine off and moved to the door. He opened it and looked out at his daughter, patiently waiting on a chair just outside.
“Any news?” she asked as she looked up.
“No,” he replied. “Come inside, please, Pippa. I want to review what I’ve learned.”
She rose with all the grace of her mother and flowed past him, holding a book of Tacitus written in Latin that she had been reading while she waited.
Closing the door, he found her seated on the one chair.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Pippa,” he began.
“I’m made of far sterner stuff than you think, Father,” she replied with a primness she inherited from dear Elizabeth.
“If I believed in angels and devils, I would have to only presume that one such opened the fabric of space/time itself and grabbed him,” Royston said. “But since we know that to be impossible, I’m at a loss.”
“Why do you presume the impossibility of such a thing, Father,” she asked, eyes glaring. “In science, you have always taught me that we use deduction to eliminate the obvious, and thus, what remains, no matter how far-fetched, must be the explanation.”
“Gareth Dankworth disappeared from this room in a way I cannot explain. And did so without opening any doors ,” Royston said. “The air vents are too small to admit anything larger than a mouse. But he is absolutely gone.”
“Then your understanding of physics are insufficient,” Pippa stated flatly.
“What?”
“As you said, science cannot explain it, and yet it happened,” she retorted. “Ergo, our knowledge of science is too rudimentary to explain that angel or devil and how they were able to open a portal through space and time to kidnap Gareth. Prior to Newton, we were still bound by the laws of gravity, even though we could not explain them. Gareth was here, and then he was not. The door did not open and there is no other method of egress. Therefore, something opened a different type of portal, one we do not understand. What did your radiation detector find?”
“Something my simple understanding of physics cannot explain,” Royston said, granting her the warmest smile the chills in his heart would allow.
Indeed, sterner stuff than he gave her credit. Stronger than many of the men he knew.
She was like Elizabeth in that. He missed his wife less, knowing how well their daughter had turned out.
“Tell me,” Pippa commanded, Queen of England facing down the Armada.
“There is a signal when I scan the handset,” Royston said, moving to the middle of the room. “The only other place I find it is here. I have scanned countless other places and rooms, and only here do I find that signature.”
“What does that tell us, Father?” Pippa continued. “It tells me that Gareth was talking on the telephone when this indescribable portal opened, right where you are standing. It pulled him through before he could resist, then the handset fell. The radiation only touched those two places, as you said.”
“But how did someone open a rift in space and time itself, in order to kidnap the man?” Royston asked.
“No,” Pippa stated flatly. “There is a more important question we should be asking. Namely, why did they want Gareth?”
Br’er Rabbit
“It helps that the perp is so damnably memorable,” Eveth said, turning away from the foot traffic on the street to study the scowl on Grodray’s face.
“I agree,” her partner conceded. “But now things will get interesting.”
Jackeith began to walk, so Eveth fell into stride beside him.
They were at the star ferry office downtown. Had just left, headed back to their own precinct building. The sun was clouded over, giving the day a soft and uncertain taste.
“How so?” Eveth asked. “We know they made it off-planet using the ferry.”
“We suspect,” Grodray corrected her. “We’ve got a witness putting them in an auto-car in the right time window. Records show that car deposited them at a haberdashery nearby. You haven’t called the operator of the shop, because we don’t want to tip our hand, and to get a warrant would require that we tell someone important what we think is going on, but more of your witnesses confirm the car’s arrival.”
“I’ve got a gut feeling on this one, Grodray,” Eveth said.
“And I have learned to trust your intuition, Eve,” he replied. “But all a raid gets us at this point is confirmation of who was there, and maybe an actual picture of the…perp.”
They were on a public street. Not even her by-the-books partner would use the word human here, for fear of starting a riot.
“What’s next?” she asked, knowing his penchant for deduction.
“So the next step was tracking auto-cars from the haberdasher,” he said. “Once you had the building identified, I went off and tracked outbound cars, assuming that they think they are safe. Pretty sure I found a target. Certainly, the credit account they are using belongs to a Warreth insurance salesman living on the southern coast. He’ll be in for a surprise when he gets his monthly bill, unless we warn him ahead of time. That also gives too much away.”
“It does,” Eveth said. “I don’t want to share this one bit more than I have to. Any judge we tell is going to call a Senior Inspector in.”
“They will, at the very least. That’s wherein the problem lies,” Grodray said. “Based on what we’ve run down today, all the other cars that left that address over the next two hours are accounted for, except for three that went to the orbital boost for the ferry, first stop: Hurquar. We have to presume they caught a ride up to space, and then left the system.”
“And walked right out of our jurisdiction,” Eveth grumbled.
“Perhaps,” Grodray countered. “Is it worth raising a fuss now?”
“Have you got the jets to lift this one, Grodray?” Eveth asked suddenly. “You’ve got a Level-7 Security Authorization.”
“And I am very careful about how I use it, Baker,” he replied. “I can go to a judge and fill out a probable cause request. That gets us a warrant to access the haberdasher’s records, but any judge we ask is likely to put in a call to a Senior Inspector, possibly the Command Inspector herself, and ask for clarification. That starts an avalanche of questions.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she stated her position. “I want what you have. I want to be on the inside of some of those investigations you obviously can’t talk about around me because I’m only Level-3. And if we’ve got a human loose, maybe another human loose, then I absolutely want to be in on that takedown.”
“Even if it means being stuck running to get coffee for a Senior Inspector?” he asked. “Just being on the back of the stage while the big shots get all the credit for the work you did? The sweat you gave? The blood you shed?”
Something in his eyes told Eveth that Jackeith Grodray had been there. Had done exactly that. And let the politicians have all the credit.
But it also made him very quietly a Level-7. Almost the top of the ladder. Hunting renegade humans would be at that level.
“We are the law, Grodray,” she growled. “I would rather see justice done than worry about getting my face in the newspaper.”
“In that case, we need to split up,” he said in all seriousness. “I’ll go make a few personal calls and get things rolling. You go home and pack some clothes for a sudden, extended vacation.”
She stopped cold and grabbed his arm to halt him. One hand indicated her uniform, even minus the outer tunic he was wearing.
“This uniform, this badge, is all I need, Grodray,” she said.
“No, Eve,” he replied. “Where we might be going, that sort of thing will get you killed.”
Eveth studied the calm certainty in his eyes and let go of his arm. There was only one place that her uniform would be a hindrance. A liability.
If they were going undercover, into the very shadows where folks like Cinnra hid.
Dreams
It was something like Chinese take-out, on an alien world that had never heard of China, or dim sum. Still, it fit the bill, more or less. White, cardboard-like boxes, filled with a variety of things that had the textures of meat, or vegetables, or fish. Half a dozen bowls of sauce, arranged on the workbench on front of Gareth from sweet to hot, according to his palate. The Nari woman preferred things less salty, and the two Yuudixtl were looking for better umami. Whatever that was.
Gareth had a low-sided bowl in front of him, and had learned to snag a quick sample and eat it before pouring more out. So far, he was batting better than average for taste, as long as he didn’t ask what anything was.
He was quite confident he didn’t want to know.
The smells, however, kept him eating.
Talyarkinash sat directly across from him as she ate, watching him like a hawk. He couldn’t tell if she was still interested in him or fearful. Probably both, if her ears moved the same way a Terran cat’s did.
Morty was next to her. Xiomber was on this side. Both were face-down, shoveling in food as fast as they could chew. Gareth was actually tasting his food.
“What are the established capabilities of genetic engineering in the Accord of Souls?” Gareth finally asked the table, unsure who would answer.
All three took turns staring at each other, hoping someone else would go first. They had been that way all afternoon.
Gareth had decided it was finally time to wrestle with the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.
“What answers are you looking for, Gareth?” Talyarkinash finally asked,
“I realize the first question I want to ask is too open-ended,” he replied. “As you said earlier, the limits might be in our imagination and not in your science. Could you undo it later?”
“Undo it?” Morty asked. “Kid, we’re grappling with the need to maybe make you over into a god, for lack of a better term. The most powerful being since the Chaa left. You want to give that up?”
“Morty, you’re talking about making me something God never intended me to be,” Gareth said. “I get that. But if you can make me into a Vanir, could you reset me to a human later? Could you possibly undo what you did to Marc?”
“Crap, Gareth,” Xiomber joined in. “Nobody’s ever wanted to downgrade. This has always been about trying to work our way around the Chaa’s limits and not die in the process.”
“I’m not a god, Morty, Xiomber,” Gareth said. “I went to Sunday School when I was a kid, and there’s only one God.”
“First off, up until very recently, humans had lots of gods, kid,” Xiomber said with authority. “Some of your cultures still do, from what research I did when we went looking for Maximus. So maybe you need a better pantheon.”
“I need to know that we can undo it,” Gareth was firm. “I can settle for being a hero out here. That’s all I ever wanted to be. But making myself over into a monster just to fight Marc, makes me just as bad as him.”
“There are no humans in the Accord, Gareth,” the Lynx woman pointed out. “Maximus is a Vanir now, by both scope and genetics. He could breed true with a Vanir woman.”
“And if you also make me one, like you plan, you’ve forever taken away from me the only woman I’ve ever loved,” Gareth replied, trying to hold the heat and anger in, at least as much as possible.
“Who is she?” Talyarkinash asked carefully.
Gareth stewed for a moment and then reached for his wallet. The scent card was still there. But so was a picture he pulled out and handed to the woman criminal scientist.
“Philippa Adeline Loughty,” he said. “Pippa. A human woman I’ve been in love with for many years. I was just about to go see her and finally propose when someone opened an illegal, cataclysmically-dangerous, private wormhole and upended my entire life. If I’m a Vanir, we can never have kids. Never raise a family. Nothing. That’s what you’ll have taken away from me.”
“Gareth, you can never go back to Earth,” Morty said. “You know that.”
“You don’t know that, Morty,” Gareth anguished. “Like Xiomber said, maybe you’ll be able to completely wipe my memory, one of these days and just deposit me back at the Arsenal like nothing happened, except for a hole in my memory.”
“Would she wait for you? Talyarkinash asked.
“Yes,” Gareth stated categorically, thumping the tabletop with a finger. “She already has, because I wanted to wait all these long years until I made it to Field Agent. If she disappeared, I’d wait for her.”
“Wow,” the woman murmured.
The others fell silent. Gareth listened to his heart pound, sure they could hear it as well.
Gareth poured a cluster of purple things that looked like barbeque pork slices onto his plate and added a dollop of the yellow sauce from the middle. It wasn’t mustard, but that wasn’t pork, either.
He was eating ashes, either way.
“I have an idea,” the Nari said quietly. “I don’t know if it would work, but it might be worth a try. Gareth, what do you know about biomimetics?”
“I’m not even sure how to spell it, Talyarkinash.”
“It’s a study of natural creatures and how evolution has produced various biological solutions to mechanical needs that we can mimic, shaving off development time in prototyping and adapting things,” she tried to explain.
Gareth listened, but the words went over his head.
“Modifying spiders to make their webbing super strong so we can use it as thread. Or inserting useful vitamins directly into milk in the cow. That’s our cover here. The lab upstairs does a little work, but mostly it’s a front for money laundering and giving people new lives by modifying their face and genes to hide from cops.”
“Okay?” Gareth asked.
“I’m frightened with the raw potential that humans have for manipulation,” she said. “But also a little excited. We absolutely need to make you over into a Vanir just so you can hide in plain sight afterwards, but maybe we can limit the major modifications by using biomimetics as a basis.”
“Did any of that make any sense to you?” Gareth asked the two Yuudixtls.
“She’s talking about building you toys, Gareth,” Xiomber finally said. “Baking all the powerful enhancements into biologically-powered genetic systems that you could maybe undo later. Or at least turn off.”
“That true?” he turned back to the woman.
Excitement brought out the beauty in those tanzanite eyes. Brought it back, and pressed the underlying fear of a berserker loose in her lab to the back. Mostly.
Probably about as good as it was getting for now.
“More or less,” she said. “The possibilities are absolutely a blank page. I’m not even sure where I want to start. But I can turn you into a pseudo-god, with a little effort.”
“Dream bigger,” Gareth said.
Morty and Xiomber turned to him, jaws agape. Hers fell open a moment later.
Gareth just fixed them with a hard gaze.
“Whatever it is, you’re already thinking too small,” Gareth said.
He drew his inspiration from the two scientists across from him. Two criminals that were responsible for him being here, but were also going to give him the chance to stop Maximus and make it all right.
Two hard-headed Yuudixtl that reminded him of dreams from when he was a kid.
If he could not go home, he could still become a hero. He would just never allow them to make him a God. Mom and Dad wouldn’t stand for that level of arrogance from their oldest child. Pastor Jacob would cast him from the kirk. And rightly so.
“I’ve met Nari and Grace,” Gareth said. “Seen Vanir and Elohynn, Borren and Moisa, at least at a distance. Yuudixtl, however, give me an idea. I could look it up, but I’m pretty sure the Chaa didn’t do it, or the Yuudixtl would have turned out differently.”
“What are you babbling about, Gareth?” Morty sputtered.
“You’re going to make me over into a Vanir,” Gareth conceded. “I get that, since the only other choice I could see easily made would be an Elohynn, but I don’t want to have to deal with wings all the time, as cool as that might be, and every kid’s fantasy when they’re eight.”
Talyarkinash started to say something, but Gareth cut her off, even as rude as it was when a woman was talking.
“You’re building me tools?” he asked her, eyes boring in. “Weapons that I’ll need to fight Maximus and his gang? Going to make me a god, according to the old stories?”
She nodded, apparently breathless with anticipation.
Gareth shook his head firmly. Locked eyes with Xiomber first, and then Morty before returning to her.
“No,” he told her firmly. “I want you to make me a dragon.”
The Hunter
Marc realized he had finally been in the Accord of Souls long enough to learn the patterns of a multi-species population, but cities as things never really changed. Olehmmishqu, on Hurquar, was really no different than New Metropolis, or reborn Shangdu, north of the ancient capitals of Nanking and Peking.
People were people, regardless of shape, color, or religious affiliation.
He was surrounded now by an entire restaurant full of them, unknowingly sharing their air with the single most wanted person in the Accord, at least until more people heard about Gareth Dankworth. After all, Marc was a cipher, a Vanir with a shady past working in the shadows of crime. Dankworth was still the thing parents warned their children against, human.
The man couldn’t hide for long.
Marc sipped a glass of wine and studied his three dinner companions. The two Warreth sisters, the crimson raptors Maiair and Yooyar, were part of his inner circle for this mission. Zorge, the Nari scientist/spy, took the other spot. Marc might have brought others, but these three were fitting well into his needs, and some of the others might be a little too well known to openly dine at a fancy joint like this.
And Marc really had a hankering for a good ribeye steak, something close enough to a baked potato, and a slice of pie afterwards. Gareth was out there, but he could wait. Marc knew how this city flowed.
Money went to the nice places. Here, that meant down on the river that ran slowly along a park-like Promenade. At least for the younger set. If your wealth was established and generational, you had a place up on the hills to the west.
Both were places he didn’t really want to see. The two traitors wouldn’t have ended up there, even trying to hide from him.
No, he needed to look in the rougher places. The warehouse district, out at the edge of town, where miles of identical blocks held tomorrow’s stock in trade. Or the meat-packing district, where refrigerated transports from various farming counties and planets coalesced with their exotic products, feeding their stock to the middlemen that served the boring, banal, cultural backbone of the Accord: the middle classes with their presumptions and small-minded ways.
Marc needed to be down with the bohemians, the artists, and the hustlers if he wanted to find a man trying to hide. The places where crime could be contained, and concealed, but still readily ignored for a good enough bribe to the right people.
Not the Constabulary. Those people had no sense of commerce. But they also weren’t that thick on the ground. No, Marc preferred the local beat cops. The men and women who knew their neighborhoods and would overlook the petty crimes for a little money on the side, as long as you kept a lid on your activities and the only victims were outsiders.
Always protect the neighborhood. Being in Olehmmishqu was really just like being home in Little Krakow, back in New Metropolis.
“What have we learned?” Marc turned his attention to Zorge, seated directly across and just finishing his salad with a crunch.
The older scientist also had the best manners of anyone Marc had kept when he thinned out some of the less-loyal elements. Zorge paused, set his fork down, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, and sipped a bit of water.
Most of Marc’s crew probably didn’t know which of the forks on the table did what. At least the sisters had learned quickly when Marc told them what they needed to do to get ahead.
“I’m working on one fundamental assumption that you should pause and reconsider,” Zorge said, at once vague and specific. “You are now seven foot two. Dankworth is only six foot one, from what you’ve said, and thus will stand out as a very short Vanir, anywhere he goes. My presumption is that Morty and Xiomber, being geneticists, will want to do the same thing to him as they did to you, possibly with a five percent increase in his physical capabilities, if that’s possible.”
“That was my thought, as well,” Marc agreed. “I don’t see him becoming an Elohynn, as interesting as the symbolism of that would be.”
“Sir?” Maiair asked, obviously a little lost at the turn of phrase.
“Back home, one could make the case for me as the Fallen One of one of our primary religions,” Marc said. “An angel who was cast out of heaven. A man who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Giving Gareth Dankworth wings would make him over into Michael, the warrior archangel. Rather fitting, all things considered, but not worth discussing at this time.”
“Right,” Zorge said. “But that brings me to a possible logical fallacy. Would he try to outthink us by turning himself into a Nari, or a Grace? He could walk right up to this table, disguised, and none of us would be the wiser.”
“I don’t think so,” Marc said, racing the newly-enlarged confines of his mind back over the years he had spent next to the man who had once been his best friend and greatest rival. “His ego would never let go of being human, so he’ll want to stay as close as possible to that baseline. Vanir are the best place to look.”
“Good,” Zorge looked relieved. “I have my teams out pounding the pavement, looking for shadow-shops that specialize in that level of genetic modification. There aren’t many, and we have to approach them quietly enough, politely enough, so that we don’t burn bridges later with any of them that aren’t hiding our prey. Second question. Do we think they went to ground on Hurquar?”
“It is an interesting parlor game,” Marc replied. “They didn’t want to bring him to Zathus, because that was our base and I have fingers everyplace they might have wanted to hide. They didn’t stay long on Orgoth Vortai. Really just enough time to distract us and vanish. My guess is that their ultimate goal was Hurquar and no farther, at least until we find them, or the cops do. They’ll need time to do whatever they have planned, so they needed to get ahead of us, but they have to stop running at some point so as to complete the work. After that, they can hide better. Yuudixtl and Vanir are two of the most common, least-insular species in the Accord. What do the authorities know?”
That last in a quieter voice as their waiter swooped by to refill water, replace bread, and pour more wine. This place really was top notch. Marc couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten bread that good.
Possibly Gareth’s mother’s bread, at a winter break celebration, but that would have been nearly eight years ago. He would have to come back to this town more.
“They got really quiet, there at the last on Orgoth Vortai,” Maiair took up the thread. “We’re facing Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray, one of Cinnra’s worst enemies, and his new partner, Eveth Baker, another Vanir like Grodray.”
“How good is Grodray?” Marc asked. “I’ve read Cinnra’s notes, but he left out too much and self-aggrandized with the rest.”
“He’s good,” Maiair replied. “Came close to unraveling us on a couple of occasions, back in the old days, when Cinnra first deposed Jeffrak and hadn’t gotten rid of all the trouble-makers with axes to grind. Forced us to go much deeper underground than we ever had been before.”
“Grodray’s not the problem,” Yooyar injected. “Baker is.”
“How so?” Marc turned his attention to the youngest member of the gang, both in age and seniority. But the latter was just a matter of time, as he stared to recruit again. Then, she would suddenly be in the middle and need some responsibilities, to see if her natural talents could be honed down and polished into something like her sister.
“Grodray is methodical,” Yooyar said. “Slow, careful, numbers-oriented. According to some of the old timers, he actually tracked us down with bank statements, wading through all the different transactions as we laundered things, spending a year just reading printouts. That’s well and good. We learned to hide better. Baker is all action. She’ll be the one that kicks in the door and stuns everyone in the room just so nobody gets away while she sorts out villains from innocent bystanders.”
“Interesting,” Marc observed. He turned to Zorge with a thin, cold smile. “When you nail down a probable target chop shop, let’s feed the constables an anonymous tip. I want to see these two in action so I know what to prepare for. We know they’re here. But they’ve gone to plainclothes work, so tracking them is harder. Let’s flush everyone out at once.”
“Understood,” Zorge said.
Further conversation ceased as the food arrived. Marc considered the two pounds of rare steak in front of him, with all the fixings. He had rarely eaten this well back on Earth. At least not since he got drummed out of the Sky Patrol.
Maybe he needed to bring in a few more folks from the old neighborhood, once he was well and firmly in control around here. The Accord of Souls was an old lady walking home in a poorly-lit alley, just waiting to be mugged.
Maybe Marc needed to make himself king.
Plainclothes
It felt wrong. Just wrong.
Eveth wasn’t naked in public, but she sure felt that way, wearing civilian clothing as they chased down leads. Back home, she would still be in her bodysuit with the scale armor and the ring badge over her heart.
That intimidated people, however unconsciously. Vanir weren’t the tallest species in the Accord of Souls, but they were the biggest, in terms of size and bulk. Eveth liked to use that to her advantage.
Here, she felt like an insurance salesman, cold-calling for new clients. Most of the people they had interviewed so far today had initially reacted that way when she and Grodray walked through the front door.
People got a lot less antagonistic when she dropped her wallet on the desk and flipped it open to reveal the badge inside, however
Still, they were making maddeningly-slow progress.
Slacks and a blazer did nothing to improve her humor.
Eveth checked the next address. Biomimetics Heavy Southern Industries LLKR.
The local Constabulary office had suggested that the place might be a cover for criminal activities. At no point, however had anybody ever been able to find anything even good enough to get a warrant that they could use as a wedge in the door, turn the place upside down with a fishing expedition.
She wondered if that just meant that the owners knew which local cops and politicians to bribe, to make sure that the authorities never knocked on their door.
She smiled to Grodray, checked the stun pistol tucked inside her jacket next to her insulating undershirt armor, and turned to her partner.
“Ready?”
“Let’s go,” he smiled sternly back.
Eveth stepped into the lift tube.
“Level Forty-seven,” she said aloud.
What will those folks upstairs do when the Constables just show up out of the blue?
There couldn’t be that many places left on Hurquar to hide. Three or four more stops, max, and they would have to rethink their approach. Maybe the human wasn’t going to go out in public, and someone just had him on ice for now, until his violence could be unleashed.
In a way, that made her more comfortable. The thought of a human scaled up to Vanir-size was truly frightening. Most of the Accord were more of a size with humans, as she understood the file Jackeith had showed her. She could take a human in physical combat, unless he had been trained to mastery in one of the amazingly-common hand-to-hand fighting arts that all human cultures seemed to invent.
Did everyone on that planet study violence from the day they could walk?
The lift deposited her on the right floor without providing any answers or solace. Grodray was there a moment later.
“Good cop?” she asked him as she strode down the unremarkable hallway towards a nice, wooden door at the end.
“Bad cop, Eve,” he replied, telling her to take the lead. “The humans call it turning on the light in the middle of the night, to see what scurries for cover.”
She nodded. Like her, he was getting tired of knocking on doors to bland faces and innocent shrugs. She could see that in his eyes. At least three of the places they had hit so far in the last two days had something about them that suggested to Eveth that a future police raid might be entertaining, but this case was too important to randomly kick over ant hills.
They needed to find a human on the loose, and do it without anybody who didn’t already know finding out.
The office door was locked, so Eveth pressed the comm panel to the right side.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice answered a few moments later. A little light came on next to the speaker, indicating that the camera was working.
Eveth held up her badge, close enough to almost obscure any view of the hallway, and then lowered it so they could see how cross she had gotten today.
“Constabulary,” she said simply. “We’d like to ask the principal researcher a few questions.”
There. Nothing more. You don’t need to know, if you’re innocent. I don’t need to spell it out, if you’re guilty.
A fine game to play. A thin line to walk.
Long pause on the other end. Perhaps vermin scurrying? There was a team back at the precinct, watching for all auto-traffic in and out of this building right now. Anybody running would have the vehicle’s controls remotely overridden and get them deposited nicely in a police parking lot for questioning.
And Eveth could run down anybody on foot.
That left only Elohynn, but there weren’t that many in this city, and there were enough cameras available. They didn’t prevent crime, because it was impossible to watch all the screens at once. Instead, they solved crime by letting investigators go back and track your every step afterwards.
The lock buzzed suddenly.
Eveth gave Grodray a shrug and opened the door. Inside was a corporate reception area so standard they might have all come out of the same decorating catalog. Desk where a receptionist would sit, currently empty. Polished wood walls with art. Two chairs and a sofa for people waiting for meetings.
This place varied from the basic design by including a Brag Wall. Eveth quickly scanned the images of a Nari woman: shaking hands with local politicians and others, accepting awards at various dinner ceremonies, and a couple of scholarly journal covers indicating a woman named Talyarkinash Liamssen published something really big inside.
Blue eyes. Fur just lighter than stone blue, with faint grayer stripes and black highlights. Eveth guessed her to be perhaps in her early thirties. Probably one of those brilliant researchers that finished all their degree work and realized that they would make more money opening a clinic catering to people trying to recapture lost youth, than trying to find gaps in the programs left by the Chaa or curing disease.
But there were always going to be people looking for immortality, however they could arrange it. Most of those folks would get scammed out of their money, but that wasn’t Eveth’s problem. It was the ones who might succeed that she had to handle.
Or folks willing to transform a human to hide him from the authorities.
Doctor Liamssen emerged from an inside door a moment later. The photos really didn’t do the woman justice, or perhaps she had used her art on herself. Eveth would have said this woman was barely out of school rather than old enough to have established a corporation like this.
Eveth made a note to look her up later. Something just didn’t smell right, already, and woman hadn’t even spoken.
“Good afternoon,” the Nari woman said carefully, pulling the door closed behind her so that three of them were alone in the front room. “I’m Doctor Liamssen. How may I help you, officers?”
“Constable Eveth Baker,” she flashed the badge again, watching the woman’s eyes for a reaction. “This is my partner, Senior Constable Grodray. We’re investigating a smuggling case, and your organization came up in an offhand way. Normally, nothing, but the sensitivity of this case requires us to check off on every box individually, so we need to ask you some questions. Is there a conference room where we could talk?”
“I was actually in the middle of something…” the woman began.
“And we won’t keep you very long, Dr. Liamssen,” Eveth overrode her. “But we don’t really have any flexibility here, and we’d like to get back to our case before the good leads grow cold.”
Sharp blue eyes. Intelligent. Calculating the odds right now.
Everyone has something they want to hide. How hard did the good doctor want to push back on a pair of unknown Constables that just popped in for a bit of tea?
Eveth smiled. Dr. Liamssen smiled back, but it was plastic and brittle.
“Yes, I suppose,” the doctor said. “If this won’t take long.”
“Just a few minutes, Dr. Liamssen,” Grodray suddenly spoke up, his baritone voice drawing the woman’s eyes and face back sharply.
The doctor was perhaps five foot eight, not counting her ears. A little taller than normal for a Nari female. Eveth was six foot seven, and out-weighed the woman by probably eighty pounds, all of it bone and muscle.
But Jackeith, the quiet one behind her, was seven foot one and three hundred pounds. Even as a skinny guy, the Nari would probably feel like a child next to a serious adult.
The look in the woman’s eyes gave that much away.
She quickly led them back through the door into a large, spacious work area, with several black-topped workbenches that had seen hard use. Lighting overhead was bright and sharp, rather than friendly. Every blemish in anything would be shown.
Good thing to know about the occupant.
Eveth scanned the various things on workbenches, but couldn’t even begin to describe them, let along classify things. Biomimetics, she seemed to remember, was about studying natural systems to replicate them in scaled-up formats, but how you did that wasn’t something Eveth had ever bothered with.
At least this place wasn’t breeding better food animals so she didn’t have a wall of scared rabbits staring out at her, and all the fear/shit smell that went with it like that one time.
This place was almost a showroom, by comparison. Utterly clean ad lacking any personality.
The doctor led them to a small conference room off to one side, with a picture window looking back over the main room.
Eveth sat and pulled out her notebook to record a few thoughts.
“So what can I do for you, officers?” Liamssen said in a voice that was too forced to be calm and innocent.
But nobody was innocent.
“Smuggling,” Eveth challenged the woman. “What do you know?”
It was a throwaway question. The sort of thing they taught you in police school to knock a subject off kilter. You didn’t care what words came out of the suspect’s mouth. Instead, you were watching how her mannerisms change when she’s surprised.
When she forgets what lies she has prepared for them.
“Huh?” Liamssen replied, utter confusion resculpting her face, ears headed different directions, whiskers twitching a-harmonically.
“Sorry,” Eveth wasn’t, but it sounded good. “An organization that has dealt with you in the past has been accused of smuggling controlled chemicals without clearances or tax stamps. We need to eliminate you as fast as we can as a suspect. However, this is a very confidential case, so we can’t tell you who they are. I was hoping we could take a quick scan of the premises and get a copy of your last ninety days’ worth of inventory, just so we can mark you off the list and move on to the next place.”
The eyes gave her away. She was good, but the nostrils flared a little too much, as if trying to smell the lies Eveth was peddling. The pupils expanded.
Eveth would have been willing to guess that the fur on the back of the Nari’s scruff was standing up right now, hard as the woman was trying to hide it.
“I don’t believe we keep those sorts of records on site,” the doctor deflected well. “This is the lab, and most of the paperwork is in the main office. Is there something you can tell me? Perhaps I might be able to show you the right things?”
Eveth glanced significantly over a Grodray, as if asking permission. She was making it up as she went, and he knew that, but cops were never required to tell suspects the truth, except on the witness stand.
“Unlicensed genetic engineering,” Eveth said in a conspiratorial tone, dropping her voice a little and adding a quaver of emotion.
She did it quite well today. Must be on.
“Oh?” the doctor countered, still off-balance.
“Someone is conducting experiments that go well beyond younger skin and different eyes, Doctor Liamssen,” Eveth admitted on an awkward voice, watching the scientist’s reaction. “Those require specialist chemicals that most labs have no need to maintain, so we just need to check your hazardous materials placards and refrigerator, and then we’ll be on our way.”
“Oh,” the Nari brightened suddenly, like Eveth had just taken a weight off the woman’s shoulders. She stood like an excited schoolgirl. “That we can do. Right this way.”
Eveth smiled and rose, innocent as the dawn, and fell into the woman’s wake. Out into the main room, so clean and well organized. Right to a four-ring binder thick with laminated cards and stamped with dates.
Eveth made it look like she was carefully checking things, flipping through them one at a time and making interested noises, plus occasional chuckles and harrumphs.
She had no idea what ninety percent of them even were, let alone what a geneticist might do with them. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t watching the notebook.
“The refrigerator?” Eveth asked after she had finished the notebook.
“There are two,” the Nari doctor pointed across the room. “Or rather, the large one is at thirty-five degrees, and the small one is at fifteen below zero, depending on the materials we’re working with in our experiments.”
Eveth took the big one first. Inside, lots of vials and bottles for a pulse injector, plus a few larger bottles, none of which she could identify. Still, she pulled out her pocketcomm and dutifully took a couple of pictures so she had labels to inspect. The freezer differed only in that the bottles were usually metal, with screw-on lids and ice rimed on the outside. More pictures. More evidence, as it were.
“I think we’ve got everything we need, Doctor Liamssen,” Eveth said brightly. She turned to her partner. “On to the next one?”
“Very good,” he said. Grodray even bowed to the Nari woman. “Doctor Liamssen, thank you for your help.”
“My pleasure,” the woman said. “Will there be anything else?”
“No,” Eveth said. “I’ve seen everything I need to. And we can show ourselves out. Thank you.”
Grodray led. Eveth followed, twitchy because she didn’t have her usual armor on, if a shot was going to strike her in the back she had turned.
But they made it to the door, unlocked it, and exited.
Jackeith didn’t even look back, but walked right to the drop-tube.
“Ground floor,” he said, vanishing.
Eveth was a step behind him, and a beat back at the first floor.
He stepped to a quiet corner and looked significantly.
“How soon can you get a warrant for that place?” she asked. “That woman’s hiding something so big I thought her heart would explode.”
“Agreed,” he said. “I’ll need twenty minutes or so to pass a message to the right people. They’ll need another twenty to get us the paperwork we need. Think they’ll wait that long up there?”
“Don’t know,” Eveth said. “I tried to play it casual, but she might have made us. You noticed how excited she was to show off the main room?”
“I did.”
“I’ve never been in a working lab that clean,” Eveth said. “Day one, something gets spilled, or set on fire, or broken. The only way that place is that clean…”
“Is if it has never been used, and what we saw was a stage for folks like us, if we broke in,” he completed the thought. “We might have found our target. We’ve certainly found somebody. You wait here. I’ll call this in and have all auto-traffic to the building locked down until we can land a Heavy Response Tactical Group on the roof.”
Eveth moved to the front atrium of the building. A hex like this was impossible for one person to cover, but she found a tea shop table with a great view of the big, open space and settled herself in. Anyone emerging from the drop tube would be visible to her before they could slink out a side entrance.
And she could run down any human.
Made
Gareth looked up as Talyarkinash came down the secret stairs three at a time. He hadn’t noticed before, because he was always studying her face for clues, but she was wearing shoes with no heel and barely any cushion, instead of the two to four inch heels most women, most human women, wore in public as a matter of course. And baggy, maroon pants that gathered at the ankle, vaguely like harem pants, plus a long, green tunic.
But the shoes were what threw him off. She wasn’t human, so applying human fashion standards to the woman felt wrong. Off.
And human women wore skirts, not slacks. Right?
“We’re made,” she called out as she came into sight.
Gareth had found another room beyond the dentist chair and the music studio. There was a whole suite of rooms through there, as a matter of fact, but he was in a common room right now, seated on one end of a couch reading about the history of the Accord of Souls on a space tablet Talyarkinash had gotten for him.
Morty was on a barstool that telescoped down for a Yuudixtl and up to a Nari-height bar. Xiomber was at a low table, eating a sandwich he had made from ingredients in a refrigerator in the kitchen, down the north hall.
Gareth had slept in a room down the south hall. At first, he had been concerned that the woman might try to slip into his room, in spite of his commitment to Pippa. He had locked the door just in case. But after that first afternoon, if she was going to do that, Gareth was pretty sure she’d be bringing a gun.
“What do you mean, made?” Morty asked. “We watched you on the screen. You did great.”
“I don’t know how, but that cop saw through everything,” Talyarkinash said. “There should have been far more questions. Intrusions. Inspections. Annoyances. The last time the city wanted to check something, I had people in here for three days.”
“She gave up too easily,” Gareth observed, calmly powering off the magical book and placing it on the end table. Something had not felt right, but he hadn’t been able to put a finger on it until Talyarkinash said something.
“Yes,” the woman said. “I don’t know why.”
“She already knows you’re guilty,” Gareth said. “She left so that she could call for reinforcements to seal off the building without you being aware that the trap was closing.”
“How would you know that?” Xiomber asked and then stuffed the last two bites into his mouth at once.
“That is how I would do it,” Gareth said. “And I’m a cop. We need to run. Right now. If we’re overreacting, we can come back tomorrow, but I doubt the building will still be an option in an hour. I’ve done this too many times to folks like you. I know what it feels like.”
He rose and stretched. Action made him hungry, but there wasn’t time to make a sandwich, and instinct told him their freedom might be measured in minutes.
“Fardel,” Morty suddenly yelled, punching his pocketcomm. “We’re screwed.”
“What just happened? “ Xiomber mumbled around his chewing.
“Two things,” Morty snarled, lowering his chair and leaving the pocketcomm behind on the bar. “One, I tried to call a taxi, and the map somehow shows no available vehicles anywhere, in the middle of the afternoon. Two, the credit account I had been charging everything to suddenly locked up and shut itself down.”
“Oh, crap,” Xiomber rose.
“Yup,” Morty agreed. “Normally, losing a credit account is nothing. We go through them all the time. Timing is exceptionally bad right now. Rather suspicious.”
Gareth turned to see Talyarkinash pulling a duffel bag from a previously-closed cabinet.
Good idea. Gareth raced to his bedroom and grabbed his own bag. Everything had been cleaned and folded, ready to go.
Or run, as the case apparently was.
Amazingly, both of the brothers had also already grabbed bags, a soft sided satchel case for Morty, and backpack for Xiomber.
“What’s the plan?” he asked.
Three days with these folks, and he had not really spent a lot of time on possible escape routes.
At first, sitting in that damned dentist’s chair three more times and getting his brain psionically drilled had left him fuzzy for hours afterwards. Then watching as Talyarkinash and the brothers sketched out designs for a suit he could wear. Except it wasn’t a suit, exactly.
Gareth hadn’t really come to terms with what they had come up with.
But they had started designing something.
And now the clock was about to expire.
Its midnight, Cinderella.
“Yuudixtl are pretty common on this planet,” Morty said. “If we split into two teams, Xiomber and I should be able to blend into a crowd well enough. Vanir and Nari tend to congress, so you two won’t raise that big of an issue together. Talyarkinash, I’m sorry that we blew your cover with this. Do you have a bolt hole we can make?”
Gareth watched the woman pass through the stages of death in a few, quick seconds, lingering on anger for perhaps a touch too long, before she reached acceptance. She gave the brothers an address and fixed Gareth with a hard scowl.
“You better be worth it,” she said.
“If I don’t stop Maximus, I’m not sure anybody else can,” he replied calmly. “The only price you’re risking is jail.”
That got through the woman’s hard façade. The ears flickered forward and her whiskers even relaxed.
“We should go first,” Gareth continued, turning to Morty and Xiomber. “If the Constables don’t know you two, they’ll key on me and you might be able to escape in the confusion.”
“Where are we without you, Gareth?” Xiomber asked.
“Go back and build a new machine, Xiomber,” he replied calmly. “Any Field Agent of the Sky Patrol you kidnap will be on your side as soon as you explain the situation to them. Invoke my name when you do.”
“You’re nuts, kid,” Morty said.
“I’m Earth Force Sky Patrol, Morty,” Gareth said. “That means something.”
“Let’s go,” Talyarkinash snapped peevishly, pulling open yet another hidden door and stepping into the hallway only a few steps from the drop-tube.
“Second floor,” she called, rather than first, and dropped from sight.
Gareth was right behind her.
The second floor of the building was a mezzanine that ran all the way around the outside of the building like a balcony. It was apparently made of glass, or aluminum that was functionally transparent, because for a moment Gareth thought he was floating in the air.
Talyarkinash had slung her bag’s strap over a shoulder and added a jacket in the same rich maroon as her pants. Gareth was wearing what he thought of as his cowboy outfit: black pants, plaid shirt, blue denim jacket, no hat. The bag holding his clothes was more of a soft suitcase, so he had it by the handle, an oversized, pine-green briefcase as he walked.
The beautiful scientist had paused long enough for Gareth to come up on her left. She held out a hand and grabbed his. Bright blue eyes with a hint of fear in them looked up at him.
“Pretend we’re on a trip together,” she said calmly as she started to walk. “Maybe a honeymoon on a new planet. Walk like I’m your girlfriend.”
He stared to say something, but swallowed it when he saw the abject terror in her eyes.
Being arrested and thrown in jail forever still didn’t frighten her anywhere near as much as being this close to a human.
What in the nine hells did people in the Accord learn about humanity? Sure, we could be a rough folk. And probably too violent, especially since all species in the Accord had an empathic bond to them, but we aren’t that bad.
Are we?
But he was Earth Force Sky Patrol. If nothing else, he had a duty to uphold the highest standards of conduct.
Gareth smiled at her and set off at a normal pace. Her ear tips were about as tall as he was, and their legs were roughly the same length. Her hand was clammy in his, and he didn’t hold too tight.
Two young lovers, just landed and walking to a hotel. He could do this. And not even blush all that hard, because his heart was still true to Pippa, no matter how beautiful or forward some of the women of this new galaxy were.
Like he would have expected at home, there was an escalator to the ground floor. Six of them, in fact, one at each corner of the building. She led him to the one farthest from the front of the tower.
The atrium wasn’t completely empty. It was mid-afternoon, and there were people coming and going. Tourists standing around. Messengers delivering packages.
Cover.
They rode the escalator down in the immediate wake of a Warreth mother and three chicks just about of an age to start school, back on Earth. They were full of questions about everything and kept their mother distracted.
Rather than stare, Gareth leaned against the side of the escalator and looked around the interior of the building. The architecture was unlike anything back home, with soaring, curved ribs like a giant whale holding the building up, instead of the normal squat pillars a human designer would have used. Curved panes of glass all around the outside made the inside feel like an aquarium, with him a prized fish on display.
Or a piranha.
Something drew his eye to the northeast corner of the ground floor. A tea shop was doing a brisk business this afternoon, catching people at that point in the day when they needed a jolt to make it through the rest of the work and then get home safe.
Someone was seated at the closest table to the center, sipping tea and amiably watching the crowds ebb and flow around her.
He had never seen her in person, only through a remote camera hidden up in Talyarkinash’s lab, but he had no doubt that the figure was Constable Eveth Baker.
Even across more than one hundred yards of space, Gareth felt her eyes lock on to him.
Gareth turned to Talyarkinash and nodded back to indicate the Constable. His eyes turned deadly serious.
“Run.”
Gazelles
Eveth was watching the drop-tube, but like a good cop, she made sure to track the rest of the space. Jackeith would be back with reinforcements in under an hour. All she had to do was bottle them up, nice and cozy on the forty-seventh floor in their cute, fake, lab.
Until she had that Nari liar handcuffed in an interrogation room, sweating, while a heavy-armed strike team cleared the space with live weapons.
Eveth was looking forward to that part. This had been a hard week.
She saw the Warreth and chicks descend from the mezzanine. Probably taking pictures of the river before heading home for dinner. Two other tourists followed, quietly enjoying their trip.
Something about the male caught her eye. Vanir male. Nari female. The light was bad at this distance, odd afternoon shadows distorting things, but something wasn’t right. Something about the image of the male.
He wasn’t anything special from this distance. Casually dressed in a style she didn’t recognize. Blond hair. Broad shoulders. A little short.
Short.
Nari females tended to run about five and a half feet tall. The Warreth woman in front of them looked about the same, so the man was a little over six feet tall. Short for a Vanir.
Tall for a human.
The man turned and made eye contact with her like he was seated across the table, rather than nearly one hundred twenty yards away.
Recognition, like an electric shock running through both of them, apparently.
He turned to say something to his companion, nudging her forward as the Warreth mother gathered up her brood and started across the tile plaza.
Eveth was already out of her chair and moving.
The human had the woman by the hand and was tugging her along now. She resisted at first, until she saw Eveth moving, and then those long, Nari legs started to churn.
Eveth didn’t bother to yell. The distance was too great, and those two weren’t about to listen to her.
And the last thing Eveth needed to do today was to start a panic about a human loose in Olehmmishqu.
Civilian clothes drove her almost to distraction as she picked up speed. In her bodysuit, there was a pouch on her right thigh, opposite her holster, for a pocketcomm. In mufti, she had been forced to stuff in into an interior breast pocket of the blazer.
The two fugitives had made it to the exterior door now. Hopefully, they would try to call for an auto-taxi, gambling that the vehicle would arrive before she did, except that Grodray’s contacts had already set up a hard lock on all calls, two blocks in every direction.
She pushed harder, closing the space to the door as they turned right and began to move.
All the two fugitives would get was an angry cop closing as fast as her Vanir legs could carry her.
She was at the door, jammed it open with her immense mass moving at high speed, and took off after them.
Eveth was confident she could run down any human.
Still, she needed backup. And help cornering them.
She pulled out the pocketcomm and triggered a call to her partner.
It rang twice before he picked it up.
“Talk to me, Eve,” he said urgently.
“I’ve got two runners, Grodray,” she said.
Any other words were lost as she plowed squarely into a pedestrian coming around a corner from the alley, one of the Tree People, built about as sturdy as an oak.
All the breath whooshed out of her and Eveth felt her skull crack hard on the man’s trunk. Fortunately, she had a really hard head.
But her pocketcomm slid away, still moving when she stopped.
The Tree Person looked down at her in surprise and offered a hand up, along with an apology.
Eveth took it, but couldn’t see her pocketcomm through the wobbly stars dancing circles around her head. Down at the far end of the block, the human and his accomplice had already crossed a street and were threatening to melt into the afternoon rush hour mobs that were just starting to emerge from buildings.
She had a choice, but it was never really in doubt.
Eveth could always track down her pocketcomm later. It would lock up in ten seconds, and Grodray could send a pulse to make it scream fit to wake the dead, once he realized she had lost it.
But in the meantime, the human would vanish into the underworld, and Eveth was pretty sure they would never get another chance like this to capture him. He had a top geneticist helping him to escape. In three days, he might look like anything at all.
Eveth growled out her rage and began to run. Since she couldn’t call for backup, she would just have to do this on her own.
She reached inside the jacket and pulled out her stun pistol. The range was too great now, but that was just a matter of anger and patience.
Right up her alley.
Hunted
Gareth could have easily outrun Constable Baker on a track. One of the horror elements of the species descriptions in the book he had been reading spelled out the immense endurance and stamina of humans compared to every other species in known space, including the presumably-horrifying little fact that some human societies had been known to chase their pray to death, jogging lightly along for hours until the creature simply collapsed of exhaustion and died.
Only Terran dogs, Humanity’s secret weapon, could match humans for endurance.
He would have liked to tell the writers of such lurid squamph that the average human worked in a factory or at a desk, and was about as dangerous as the average citizen here, but they wouldn’t listen. He was a human, after all.
And it wasn’t Gareth against a single Constable. He had Talyarkinash to protect, and a strange and wondrous city into which he could easily become so disoriented that he became an easy target for some innocent beat cop.
Gareth would not kill an authorized law enforcement agent doing their job. He wouldn’t even hurt one any more than necessary to escape.
He had to represent all humans to the Accord of Souls. On his life would be their eventual welcome into broader galactic society.
Fortunately, rush hour was apparently the same, the galaxy over. Happy hour had dawned and people were starting to sneak out of offices a little early to get a head start on family life, or extra time down at the corner bar.
Just in the few seconds since they had emerged from the building and gone a block, the number of people on the sidewalk had practically doubled. Gareth was hard pressed not to run into people hard enough to knock them down, especially while also not losing Talyarkinash’s hand.
She was his lifeline right now, and he needed her like a lifesuit in a hull breach. Fortunately, she needed him just as much. Without Gareth and the brothers, she would have nowhere to go when the police did come back and started going through her files.
He tried not to shout out his internal joy that another criminal ring would be broken, because that meant he was about to go down with them. A cop like Eveth Baker would shoot first and he would wake up behind bars for the rest of his life, while they tried to figure out a way to completely wipe his memory without taking the rest of his mind with it.
That woman had the look about her.
And she was chasing them, gun in hand and down by her side like a well-trained operative. Gareth understood instinctively how dangerous she would be.
At the corner, the light held them for a second. Gareth glanced back and picked her up through the mass of bodies as she came after them. He watched Baker run into a walking tree (A WALKING TREE?) and lose her communications device, the handheld sliding under a car parked at the curb.
It gave him an idea as the light turned to walk.
“Talyarkinash, I need you to trust me,” he said as they pressed their way forward through the growing mob of strangely-smelling folks.
He felt her dig her heels in hard, because she stopped moving and he nearly pulled her over accidentally.
“Trust you?” she snarled quietly. “You?”
“I think I can get us away from her, but I need your help,” Gareth said. “Your trust. I swear that I will do everything I can to protect you, on my honor as a Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol.”
“Are you insane, Gareth?” she hissed.
Gareth decided that they were losing ground to Constable Baker while arguing. He pulled the Nari scientist along by sheer strength.
“Maybe,” he admitted as she allowed herself to fall into stride again.
It was like pushing against ocean waves to get to the calmer, open water, getting through the press of bodies.
There. An alley way between two buildings, possibly allowing industrial vehicles access to interior loading bays. The asphalt was worn and dirty, and no plants lined the walls.
He looked back and Baker had chosen pursuit over assistance. She was holding her gun and had foregone her radio for backup.
Gareth pulled Talyarkinash into the alleyway, like two young lovers sneaking off for a quick smooch out of the flow of traffic. Nothing could be further from his mind, but anything to confuse people worked in his favor.
Like New Metropolis back home, the streets were movie set facades, pretty on the street, but unwashed, ugly, and industrial in the alleys. Gareth counted dumpsters, trashcans, a parked delivery truck, and several overhead balconies, possibly good, old-fashioned fire steel escapes. None of the latter provided him the cover he needed, but the rest of the space would do.
Gareth measured off the strides he needed, pulling Talyarkinash along with him.
“She’ll be here in seconds,” he said urgently. “I need you stretched out on the asphalt here, like you’ve tripped and twisted your ankle, and I didn’t stop. She’ll see you, and come to arrest you. I’m hiding close by. I will jump her when she gets here. Can you do that?”
“The alternative is jail?” Talyarkinash asked.
“The alternative is Maximus finds out you’ve been helping me and the brothers, and kills you,” Gareth said simply. “I’m trying to prevent that right now. Later, I need your help to save the galaxy.”
The terror was still there in those ocean-deep eyes, like icebergs floating on a storm-tossed, angry sea. But something else appeared.
He might have been bold enough to call it hope, if he wanted to push his luck.
“You’ll protect me?” she asked quietly.
“I promise,” Gareth stated.
Before he could react, she lunged forward and kissed him, one arm around his neck and whiskers tickling his face. She felt ice-cold initially, but warmed in the second he held her.
“Go,” she ordered, tossing her bag further down the alley and stretching herself out, just as he had explained it.
Gareth loped over to one of the dumpsters and crawled into a shadow cast by the delivery truck, face all a-blush. Now all he had to do was hope that the driver was too busy having a smoke to come out in the next thirty seconds.
“Come back here, you bastard,” Talyarkinash suddenly yelled at the top of her lungs. “You can’t leave me.”
Gareth nearly surged out of his hiding place, then stopped himself. He peeked anyway.
Talyarkinash honestly looked like she was watching him run away from where she had fallen, as a cowardly Gareth had panicked and fled.
Like he had done the absolutely unthinkable and left one of his own behind.
But humans had no reputation for honor here, either.
“Gareth,” Talyarkinash yelled. “Come back.”
“Freeze,” an angry woman called.
Gareth recognized the voice from the building.
Constable Baker, right on time. Hopefully alone.
Talyarkinash stopped yelling. Glanced back and moaned wretchedly.
“Oh, you bastards,” she cried. “All of you.”
“Where is he?” Baker yelled.
From the volume, she had entered the mouth of the alley. Probably in a two-handed stance, one hand cupped under the other to steady her pistol, since she didn’t have the walkie-talkie with her. Most likely turned thinways to her target to reduce her silhouette.
Gareth held his breath.
“Where is he?” Baker repeated.
“Bastard abandoned me,” Talyarkinash replied angrily. “I fell down and couldn’t get up, so he just ran.”
“Show me your hands,” Baker ordered.
Gareth couldn’t see the Constable when he slid an eye even with the edge of the dumpster, but Talyarkinash was in clear sight, ignoring him as she faked a bum leg and held her hands up.
“Roll over on your stomach, hands behind your back,” Baker called.
She had to be walking slowly closer, as the echoes softened. Gareth might have done the same thing, approaching carefully and by the book.
Knowing who he was dealing with, Gareth might also have just shot the criminal on the ground with the stunner, to be sure. Talyarkinash had a dangerous edge underneath that scholarly brain.
But the Nari woman complied. Laid out flat with her hands behind her.
Trusting Gareth to save her life.
The surge of pride made him feel ten feet tall.
Shadows on the pavement as Baker got close. Gareth could track her now, with enough sun behind her.
He would be reaching for handcuffs about now. Moving towards his weak hand side so he could hold the pistol while snapping a cuff over a wrist.
Baker was left-handed, she would be shifting towards him, and turning her back on his hiding place.
He hoped.
There.
Now or never.
Gareth rose on silent feet and exploded out of his hiding place.
He had to pretend Baker wasn’t a girl as he was about to tackle her. All of his soul cried out in shame at hitting a woman, and doing it from behind as well.
Her being half a head taller, and almost as broad in the shoulders helped. He was back on the muddy turf, bringing down a burly tight-end short of the goal line to save the play, the game, and the season.
Slamming into her felt like that tackle had been. Damn, she must outweigh him, too.
The woman must have had a sixth sense. Something warned her and she glanced back at the last instant, tangled up with gun, cuffs, prisoner, and rampaging human.
They ended up in a jumble of bodies, but Gareth used all his training to force his way on top. She was muscled like a tight-end as well, so he didn’t have time to wrestle with her. Not if he wanted to survive.
God only knows what kinds of martial arts Accord cops were taught.
Instead, he broke every rule his mother had hammered into him as a child. He had hit a girl. Knocked her down and pinned her to ground.
Gareth punched her in the middle of the forehead, as hard as he could. It was like trying to open a coconut with a fist.
But it worked. Her head bounced off the hard pavement almost as hard as it had his fist and her eyes lost focus.
He punched her a second time, wailing inside at the thought of his father finding out when he came home. Another bounce.
This time she stayed down.
He checked her eyes. They were half rolled back, unfocused, but symmetric, so he had just knocked her out cold and into a mild concussion.
Still, he climbed up and rolled her onto her side so she wouldn’t somehow choke. The handcuffs had fallen just about with them, which was fortuitous.
Gareth grabbed Agent Baker and lifted her enough to shift her over to the dumpster he had used as cover. A quick snap and the handcuffs latched her to a ton of steel. He had no idea what a key might look like, but hopefully this would be enough of a peace offering.
He was a human. He was supposed to be a mindless, killing machine threatening all civilization with bloodshed.
Maybe, just maybe he could communicate with them by not using violence.
“Not bad, buddy,” another voice said. High tenor, nasty tones.
Gareth looked up at a Warreth male, standing in the mouth of the alley, holding a gun on him.
This one didn’t look like a cop. Too slovenly, compared to Agent Baker and her partner.
Gareth was willing to gamble that he had just found one of Sarzynski’s men.
“Stand up slowly, human,” the birdman said, confirming the first estimation.
Only one of Maximus’s men would know him by species on sight.
Gareth complied, hands out but not overhead. His mind was racing with options, but the birdman was far enough away that he could probably shoot Gareth without a problem.
He needed to get out of this alley, and quickly.
And he really needed to be away from all of this before somebody’s backup arrived.
“You work for Maximus?” Gareth asked carefully.
“That’s right,” the Warreth gunman said with a sneer. “Told us to watch the cops. Follow them around, in case they led us to you. And lookie what we have here.”
“I’d rather not,” Talyarkinash said.
She shot the man with Baker’s gun, both of them forgotten in all this excitement.
Gareth realized just how lucky he could be.
“Thank you,” Gareth told her as she emerged from behind the delivery truck, pistol in hand pointed at the thug.
“I did owe you one,” she smiled up at him. “What do we do with them?”
“Is that a stunner?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Hers.”
“Can you adjust the stun?”
“Sure.”
“Put it on the highest setting and shoot him again,” Gareth said. “How long will he be out?”
“Probably hours,” she replied, adjusting something with her other hand and then shooting the birdman again. “Now what?”
“Now I would like you to put the gun back in Agent Baker’s holster,” Gareth said. “And then we’re going to run like hell.”
“You just knocked her out,” Talyarkinash said. “She’ll be awake long before he is.”
“And she’ll have her handcuffs, badge, and gun,” Gareth agreed. “I’m trying to send them a message.”
“What message?”
“That we’re on the same side,” Gareth said.
Rescued
“I don’t care,” Eveth growled, holding an icepack to her face and forehead. “He’s mocking us.”
“And he could have killed you, Baker,” Grodray replied mildly.
It didn’t help that her partner was probably right. She had come to, handcuffed to the dumpster with her own manacles. Badge and gun were tucked into their spots. Unconscious thug with a rap sheet a mile long stunned and laid out at her feet.
She had just managed to free herself when Grodray arrived with half a dozen uniforms holding weapons out.
Now, they were all back up on the forty-seventh floor, taking Talyarkinash Liamssen’s life apart. No reason to waste a perfectly good warrant. And she had found an icepack in a personal refrigerator, down a set of steps concealed by a bookcase and hiding a medium-sized apartment.
Grodray had taken charge of things at that point, setting her down in that sterile conference room upstairs with instructions not to move while forensics teams went to work.
“What do we know?” Eveth asked, raging inside but controlling it.
She couldn’t believe she had fallen for something so obvious. The human was dangerous, that much she knew. Half a foot shorter, but roughly the same mass, and extremely strong. And he had a punch like a wallop. Her head was still ringing.
“The two Yuudixtl were probably here with them,” Grodray said, reading off his notes. “We’ve found indications four people were staying downstairs, and at least one was the right size. They had been here three days, from the trash in the can and the food missing.”
“Missing?” Eveth asked, still a little fuzzy.
“Count slices of bread missing from a loaf, divide by two, and you have meals served,” Grodray smiled. “Things like that. Crude but effective.”
“Right.”
“The Yuudixtl obviously disappeared when you went after the others, and we have no witnesses,” Grodray continued. “Cameras probably caught something, but it will take time to track that down. I’m sure they made it outside the lock-down zone and called a cab with a new credit account they had stolen.”
“Sirs, you might want to see this,” one of the cops, a young Grace officer with good instincts, had appeared in the door and motioned them to join in.
“What have you got?” Grodray was first, only because Eveth had to stand up, wobble the tiniest amount, and then follow.
“Not sure,” the male cop said. “We think she was in a hurry to destroy things, but missed this.”
They followed him out into the main room, down the stairs, and into a small work area off the main control room with the worthless music studio deck. Liamssen had done something to the computer controlling it all, and none of the knobs or sliders did anything now, as far as anybody could tell.
Another officer was standing there, holding a piece of paper that had been crumpled up at some point, now flattened out on the desktop.
Eveth leaned over the Grace cop’s shoulder to look. The tentacles were almost painful on her head and neck, but she could deal with that. Except that everywhere those tentacles touched, the pain receded.
She glanced down at the officer in surprise. He smiled sheepishly and blushed.
“Thought it might help,” he offered.
“It does,” Eveth replied. “Thank you.”
He leaned closer. She leaned closer. It was almost like they were kissing, except both were faced to the side. It was still a bizarre experience, one that should have been erotic, under almost any other circumstances.
The paper was a sketch, drawn freehand but by an extremely skilled hand. It showed a wing, such as an Elohynn might have, coming out from the back and down to a central elbow joint, before running up to a rough point overhead.
But the scale was all wrong, if the lengths on the side were any indication.
An Elohynn male, roughly six feet tall on average, had wings that were roughly nine feet long, with a twenty-foot wingspan on a mature adult.
This wing would be almost three times that.
“Any ideas?” Grodray asked.
Eveth pulled clear of the forest of helpful kelp and stood fully upright with a nod of thanks to the cop.
Grodray was deduction writ large. Eveth had always suspected the reason she was paired with him, once the bosses realized that they wouldn’t hate each other, was that she brought induction to the equation.
Leaps of intuition that the evidence just wouldn’t cover.
“Ornithopter?” she tossed out.
It was utterly inefficient, since something like an auto-car rode powered lifters and could also maneuver in low planetary orbit once a transport tube had lifted you. But the Elohynn preferred personal flying to anything else, including walking.
But why would a human want to build an Ornithopter?
She shrugged after a moment.
“Where did you find this?” Grodray pointed at the page.
“Crumpled up and behind the waste drop, sir,” the Grace cop said. “Looks like someone didn’t like the design, but missed the incinerator bucket, and were either too lazy to get up, or didn’t see it fall long.”
“Tag it and scan it into the files,” Grodray instructed the man.
Eveth followed her partner into the main common room where obviously the criminals had been waiting. There were remains of a sandwich on a low table, a pocketcomm that one of the Yuudixtl had been using to access a stole credit account on the bar, and a reading tablet on the end table next to the sofa.
“Three of them in here, watching us upstairs?” Eveth asked, taking it all in at a glance.
“That’s my theory, Eve,” Grodray said. “Given the timelines, Liamssen came down stairs as soon as we left, everyone panics. They run, taking the time to grab go-bags from that cabinet over there, and to tell the computers to kill themselves.”
“So we’ve found them, and lost them,” Eveth said. “Now what?”
“Now we turn up the heat,” Grodray smiled with a cruel mouth and lips pressed thin. “Assault on a Constable. Flight From Justice. And we have Dr. Liamssen’s full bio signature, plus a good description of the other three.”
“Do we lock the city down?” Eveth asked.
“Had you been hurt, or killed, I would have gotten nasty, Eve,” Grodray said in a voice that managed to make even a hardened cop like Eveth shiver. “The perp did the absolute minimum necessary to escape you, plus he left us a prize, like a cat bringing home a mouse. I want to sweat that Warreth hard and open up a second avenue of the investigation, but we’re going to hand the punk off to another team so we can focus on the perp.”
“Can you do that?” she asked, suddenly breathless with anticipation. This was up there with Level-7 Security.
“I talked to the Planetary Inspector while the medics were checking you out,” Grodray stated. “She’s cleared us to act like free agents here.”
Free agents. Just a tiny step short of Prime Inspector, the dream of every cop, to be able to pursue any crime they thought warranted their attention, on any planet of the Accord of Souls, and demand the full cooperation of the local authorities.
Not request. Demand.
Jackeith Grodray had said he never wanted to get to that level. Hell, he had never gone farther than Senior Constable, but that was a personal choice that Eveth would never settle for.
But Grodray had a Level-7 Security Authorization. Had they offered him Prime Inspector at some point and he refused?
Eveth made a note to learn as much as she possibly could from the man while they were partnered. Jackeith Grodray had always been exceptional, spoken of in the department in reverential tones. Was he even better than that?
“Step one?” Eveth asked after she got her thoughts under control.
“Dinner,” Grodray said. “I know a good take-out joint not far from here, so we can move quickly if we get a hit on an All-Points Bulletin in the next hour. Then I’m going to turn up the heat and see what boils.”
Again, Eveth felt a shiver at the tone. She wasn’t sure she had ever seen Grodray lose his temper, but that was what this felt like.
Which was good, because she was well past that point with the damnable human running loose in her city.
Escaped
Morty breathed a sigh of relief as the maître d’ settled them in a semi-private room just outside the kitchen and left menus.
“Shouldn’t we be making our way to Talyarkinash’s backup place?” Xiomber asked soberly before taking a long drink of water.
“Yes and no,” Morty replied, studying his brother for signs of wear or fear. “The lab’s been burned now. And we know the other two got away, or the cops would have made a much bigger stink about catching a human. Somebody would have leaked that to a news crew, regardless of the situation.”
“Okay, so we all got away,” Xiomber agreed. “And?”
“So now we have a secondary duty to look after ourselves, egg-brother,” Morty said. “Like Gareth said, if he gets taken, it will be up to us to build a new generator array and kidnap another cop from Earth, if we want to stop Maximus. We can’t do that from inside a jail cell.”
“You think Talyarkinash’s other place will get raided?” Xiomber asked.
“I don’t know,” Morty admitted. “But we’re hiding from the cops, the Constables, and Maximus now. That doesn’t leave us a lot of places to go, because Talyarkinash would have needed underworld help to set up her bolthole in the first place. Somebody knows. The question is how quickly they’ll talk, and that hinges on either fear of Maximus or a good enough reward from the cops.”
Xiomber followed Morty’s logic as he emptied his water glass. It had been a nerve-wracking couple of hours. He was a scientist, not a bank robber. A good salad and a pasta right now would help calm him, because they needed to find a way to set up their own bolthole on this planet. One where they could hide from agents of Maximus and the law at the same time.
“How long can we run?” Xiomber asked, calming enough to go through the implications.
“We spent a month setting this gig up,” Morty reminded the man. “Once we realized that Maximus wasn’t going to just settle for being the kingpin of the criminal underground but wanted to rule everything. It was only a matter of time before he brought in more humans to help. I’ve got eight more credit accounts we can access right now, and connections to a couple of brokers for more, so we’re good for money. I know a few places we might could hide, but it depends on the Constabulary now. I’m expecting random, armed raids on a number of them tonight, expressly looking for any of four known fugitives. We cleaned up Talyarkinash’s lab well enough, but we were in a hurry and the cops will find enough.”
“So hiding in plain sight at a restaurant is a good idea?” Xiomber rolled his eyes.
“Cops aren’t going to roust this place,” Morty replied. “And there are probably thirty other Yuudixtl in here right now, so we don’t stand out. This buys us another couple of hours, then I know an all-night tea house in a nice part of town, over by the university. We can hang out there, as long as you don’t mind open mic poetry night.”
Xiomber rolled his eyes again, but Morty expected that. His egg-brother was not a bohemian by any stretch of the word. But cops would never look in a tea house filled with weird kids playing guitars and chanting bizarre performance art to total strangers.
In the morning, if they were still able and the idea still sounded good, they could make their careful way to where Talyarkinash was hopefully hiding with Gareth, and move on to the next step. Or just run and find themselves another place to hide while they worked on a different plan to save the universe.
Damn the Constables for being good enough, smart enough, or maybe lucky enough to have broken things so wide open, so early. Morty had been counting on having at least a another week, and then it would have been someone from the old gang sniffing around.
Talyarkinash could have deflected them long enough, and then Morty and his brother could have unleashed an avenging angel on people who seemed to want to take the whole damned Accord of Souls down.
Didn’t those fools understand that you had to have a working society first?
Morty could see a dark future where Maximus got himself made over into an emperor. He would have to institute a reign of brutality to keep power, which would mean more humans, until all of the old species of the Accord, bound by their psionic empathy, became a permanent slave class to a caste of humans and other murderous criminals.
If Morty had realized all this a year ago, when Cinnra decided he needed a personal killer to keep power, Morty might have quit and turned state’s evidence then. Better jail than the sort of dystopian future Morty might have personally helped give birth to.
He could only hope that it truly was possible to fight fire with fire.
At least he and his egg-brother had managed to destroy the wormhole station back on Zathus. Maximus wouldn’t be able to bring in more humans until he built a new one, and that would take time, especially if the cops were watching, and the overlord had lost his two best physicists to crises of conscience.
The waiter came and took their orders. Morty had wanted some wine, just to help with his nerves, but Xiomber overrode him. And he would let his brother do that. It was only fair, if he was going to drag Xiomber to a poetry slam later.
“I hate you, by the way,” Xiomber mentioned as the waiter left.
“What did I do this time?” Morty asked.
“You’re going to turn me into one of the good guys, you bastard,” his brother snapped. “All our lives we’ve wanted to be criminals, you know. Could have gotten legitimate jobs, but that was too staid. And now I’m running for my life from every goomba and cop in this town.”
“Sorry,” Morty offered.
“Is it ever going to get better, you suppose?” Xiomber asked.
Morty shrugged.
“We have to save galactic civilization from a madman first,” Morty replied. “And then deal with a human cop that we’ve turned into a god, and a criminal underworld that won’t forgive us, either way. I’m happy enough to be in the frying pan right now, because the alternative is the fire itself.”
“Do we turn ourselves in?” Xiomber asked. “Tell the cops everything, including what we plan for Gareth, and see if they can stop Maximus?”
“They won’t believe us,” Morty said. “We’ve already shredded the law books at this point. Fardel only knows how many centuries we’d be sentenced too, even with time off for good behavior. Gareth would be in the cell with us, or a zoo, which is the same thing. Maximus would dance right around any traps they thought they could set to catch him, and then end up grand poohbah of everything.”
“No,” Xiomber countered. “I mean everything we know. The crooked cops. The suborned prosecutors. The Constables Maximus secretly recruited. Everything.”
“We wouldn’t live to see the inside of a jail cell, brother,” Morty replied mournfully.
“It might be worth trying,” Xiomber said.
“We’ll give Gareth a shot first,” Morty said. “I think he has what it takes to do this.”
“And if he succeeds, brother?” Xiomber snapped. “We’re still guilty of breaking just about every law on the books. You think they’ll just kiss us on the snout and send us on our way?”
“I think that I would enjoy spending the rest of my life in the next cell over from Maximus,” Morty retorted. “At least the rest of the Accord of Souls would have survived, at that point. That’s way better than some of the options I can see right now.”
Xiomber wanted to say something sarcastic and biting to that. Morty could see it in his eyes, almost taste it in the scent his egg-brother gave off. But Xiomber held his silence.
Morty knew why.
He was right.
In the end, if the Accord didn’t survive, being outside the jail wouldn’t mean much of anything.
Because Morty had been the one who had done the most to tear it down.
Safe
Gareth opened the door first, Talyarkinash standing off to one side in case somebody was waiting inside and opened fire. Not that there was much of anything he could do if the game was indeed up, but it made him feel better.
In addition to a couple of bags of takeout food they had grabbed a few blocks over, she still had the pistol she had taken off the thug, to replace Constable Baker’s sidearm. That punk wouldn’t be needing it again. It was in her hand now, only shaking a little bit as the toils of the day took their toll on the Nari woman.
Talyarkinash wasn’t nearly as fragile as the human women he had known. Most of them, anyway. Pippa might have had a heart of gold, but there was still a spine of titanium. She and Talyarkinash might have seen eye to eye on many things, although they would never meet.
Thinking about his beloved helped him frame the Lynxwoman scientist better. Women in the Accord weren’t soft creatures that needed to be protected at all costs. That cop had almost been tough enough to take him singlehandedly, after all.
And Talyarkinash hadn’t shrunk from shooting the Warreth in the alley to save his life.
Gareth took a deep, confused breath, and pushed the door open. It was made of some light but extremely durable plastic and swung inward on silent hinges.
Inside, he found a traditional flat, with a compact kitchen and dining area on his right, and a long, skinny salon on the left. The furniture in here was odd, but Gareth put that down to Talyarkinash’s personal tastes.
The couch was an open, wooden frame with a single pad that folded in the middle, rather than the sort of thing he had known growing up, overstuffed and upholstered, with lace doilies on the back.
A chair in the front corner appeared to be a square, metal-tube frame with a kickstand back. A single piece of black canvas had been sewn around the frame in such a way as to form a person-sized hammock, for lack of a better way to describe it.
Instead of a big wooden armoire to hold the entertainment system, there was a single flat panel thinner than his thumb, maybe a yard across, hung from the wall across from the couch-thing, with odd-looking shelves below it. Each shelf appeared to be a wooden box about eighteen inches deep and eighteen or thirty-six inches wide. They were stacked up and leaned against the wall, providing a variety of flat spaces to put books and other knick-knacks.
Down the left side of the center wall, Gareth could see a door he presumed was a restroom, and another to her bedroom.
Nobody was visible when Gareth entered the room. He quickly confirmed the other two spaces were what he thought, and empty, returning to find Talyarkinash standing in the salon, arms wrapped around herself and shivering.
Gareth wanted to walk up and wrap his own arms around the woman to help comfort her, but that didn’t sound like a good idea. It might remind her she was supposed to be afraid of him.
Instead, he moved to the counter where she had set the food and began unpacking things onto the table. Protein and calories would be a good idea right now, as he had missed dinner while they slunk through back alleys and quiet streets, making sure they didn’t have a tail of any kind.
“Food?” he asked, trying to break through the wall of frost that had seemed to settle itself around the scientist.
She visibly shuddered once, drawing a deep breath, but she joined him, pulling two bowls from a cabinet and filling glasses with water.
They sat at a low table that reminded Gareth of ancient Japan. Pillows on the floor in various colors instead of chairs, so he kicked off his shoes and knelt. The table itself appeared to be a two foot by four foot sheet of three-quarter inch plywood, painted black and enameled over. Looking underneath, it was held up by an overturned, red milk carton.
Weird.
Gareth presumed it was an artistic statement of interior decorating, rather than poverty. Maybe a cover as a poor student, since this was where she went to hide, expecting the police to be waiting at her regular apartment.
She joined him, digging into the food with chopsticks. He had never learned the trick to eating with two sticks, so Gareth had to settle for an odd, plastic device that combined a spoon with short tines from a fork.
“Do we know when Morty and Xiomber will arrive?” he asked after selecting a random mix of colors and shapes into his bowl.
She shrugged and chewed. After a moment, she took a drink and fixed him with a focused gaze.
This was when a medusa would turn him to stone. Fortunately, his associate tonight was a Nari, and not a Grace.
Gareth surprised himself by not freaking completely out to be surrounded by aliens of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Pastor Jacob would probably expect that they were all going to hell, but they really were good people, the ones he had met so far.
“We can’t even be sure that they will join us,” she said in a cold, hard voice. “If we get caught, you told them they had to build a new machine and get another human agent to help. They might have gone off to do that as an insurance policy.”
“Oh,” Gareth commented neutrally. “I had not considered that.”
“And I think we should move quickly ourselves, regardless of when we see them,” Talyarkinash continued. “I have all my notes, even if I had to destroy everything at the lab. And it will be extremely experimental, beyond anything I’ve ever tried before, and dangerous, but I’m not sure what I can do to mitigate that, so we don’t gain much time by waiting.”
“You were ready when the Constables showed up?” Gareth asked. Nobody had told him that.
“Close enough,” she admitted. “The next step was to mix reagents and test them against human DNA, and I can do that first thing tomorrow.”
“You have a lab here?”
He was shocked. Just in case, Gareth had examined every room, but detected no sign.
“The back of the linen closet has a hidden door,” she said. “I own the next flat over on this floor and I converted it into a small lab, just for this exact circumstance, the need to do something when I couldn’t work downtown.”
“Wow,” Gareth managed.
For a Field Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, he was certainly getting a first-class education in the criminal mind this week. The bad guys back home were never going to escape him. If he ever found a way to return.
Dinner went quickly. Gareth watched her put a few containers in the refrigerator and the rest into an incinerator slot on the wall. He moved to the weird-looking sofa and decided it was wide enough. He grabbed a blanket from the linen closet in the bathroom while she watched and took off his boots.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Going to sleep,” Gareth replied. “I’m tired and tomorrow already feels like a busy day.”
“But on the couch?” Talyarkinash pressed.
Gareth fixed her with his own, serious gaze.
“Yes,” he said firmly.
As a contest of wills, it was over quickly.
Gareth thought he detected a sag in her otherwise-rigid spine, and then she walked past him.
“Okay,” she said mildly. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he replied, stretching himself out as much as he could.
When his weight shifted, Gareth discovered that the back and bottom moved on sliders built into the sides. He got up, tugged experimentally on the bottom, and was rewarded when the entire thing slid out and flat, providing him a bunk wider than he had back at the Arsenal, and long enough, if he slept diagonally, to stretch out.
Lovely invention.
He got horizontal and started to relax.
Up the hallway, the light under Talyarkinash’s door went out after a few minutes and the apartment fell into silent darkness.
Gareth knew he should be sleeping. However, the day had been too much for him to unwind quickly, so he listened to the building creak. The walls themselves were thick enough to obscure the sounds of neighbors, but fans blew warm air about, and the refrigerator hummed to itself occasionally, keeping his mind too alert.
After fifteen minutes or so, Gareth heard the bedroom door open, and bare feet pad quietly across the carpet. His eyes had adjusted to the dimness, so he could see Talyarkinash, dressed in a pair of long, silken pajamas, walk into the center of the room.
Rather than speak, Gareth waited, unsure what was going through the beautiful alien’s mind. At least she wasn’t holding a gun.
She knew he was awake. Her eyes were better than his in this light, and his were open, watching her.
He would be true to Pippa. Period.
Nothing could change that rock-solid conviction.
“I’m cold,” she said in a soft voice just above a whisper.
Cold? Then add another blanket, or turn the heat up.
But he didn’t say that.
Because it wasn’t a physical chill that had gripped her.
No, this one was spiritual. The sort of things he had been grappling with for four days, lost on an alien adventure in a land he had never dreamt of.
Gareth was fully dressed, except for his boots by the couch and his denim jacket hanging on a hook by the front door. Talyarkinash was wearing silk pajamas with a floral print on them. In the darkness, he would have guessed the fabric to be salmon, with crimson designs.
It might cover the body, but it left almost nothing about her shape to the imagination.
Still, they were both fully dressed. And it said a lot that she might trust him that much.
Gareth pulled the blanket back as an invitation for her to climb in with him.
She did, pulling the blanket around her and sliding backward into him. Gareth rolled onto his side, one arm under her head and the other wrapped around her arms to give her heat, even though he could feel the woman’s warmth through the layers of clothing separating them.
After a few minutes, she fell asleep, astounding Gareth.
After another few minutes, he joined her.
Part Three
Heroes
Morning
Gareth awoke to light leaking past the curtains in the front of the flat. He was alone on the sofa, which helped. He had no idea how he would have dealt with the beautiful Nari woman waking up in his arms.
But she had wakened first and managed to slip out with rousing him. He heard her now, making tea in the kitchen, on the other side of the central wall, metal spoon clinking on a porcelain mug.
Gareth threw back the blanket and stood, taking the time to fold the thing back into a sofa and fold the blanket up.
“Gareth?” she called quietly.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t meant to wake you.”
“You didn’t, I don’t think,” Gareth recalled. “This is my normal time to wake up.”
“Tea’s almost done,” she appeared around the edge of the wall. “Or you can take a quick shower in the sonic fresher first.”
Gareth nodded and headed to the bathroom.
That had been the single coolest thing he had found about the Accord of Souls. Instead of walking naked into hot water, he could step into a small booth without taking off his clothes, just stand there for sixty seconds while the device bombarded him with some sort of sonics and radiation, then stay there while another machine vacuumed him in a way that left both him and his clothes completely clean. He hadn’t even had to do laundry once since he got here.
Taking that technology home to Earth might put a lot of people out of work, but it would save so much time that everyone should come out way ahead.
The only thing that had been a problem was that he didn’t have a razor. Morty had brought one before, made for a Vanir male, but they’d forgotten to stop at an all-night grocery where they could get a new one. Fortunately, his stubble was blond, so it wouldn’t show up for a few days. He felt bad being out of uniform.
Except he was already out of uniform. It had been packed early, and hidden. He was undercover. Should he grow a beard?
He’d never gone more than three days without shaving, since he started.
What kind of Undercover Agent could he be, with hair already a week past the point he should have gone to the barber, and a beard?
Gareth hadn’t come to any conclusion by the time he rejoined the woman scientist, but his brain was percolating like a proper coffee pot.
She must have been up for a while, because she had already gotten cleaned up and changed from her pajamas into an outfit similar to yesterdays: harem-like pants in baby blue with a lavender tunic over that, wrapped by a cute belt in black leather with all sorts of decorative, silver bangles.
She handed him a mug of steaming tea and smiled.
“How are you feeling this morning?” she asked.
“Refreshed,” he discovered as he said the word.
Really spot-on. Like he had just slept twenty-four hours after eating the best ribeye possible.
“Good,” she said. “Come with me.”
He followed her into the bathroom. She pressed a hidden catch and the back of the linen closet opened into a hidden room beyond. They went through, and Gareth found himself back in the room with the dentist chair, but the walls were more of a brown color.
Beyond it, the same kind of control room as at her lab.
Back where her bedroom would have been, in the other apartment, a working space like what he was really expecting. Just a single workbench with the black top, scarred and stained and melted in a few places.
A computer on a desk in the corner.
Restaurant-sized refrigerators took up the whole back, three of them.
She moved around the workbench and gestured him to stand across from her.
“You here,” she ordered mildly. “I need to take some blood, and then test how it will react. Take off your outer shirt, please.”
She was more relaxed today. That much was obvious. Maybe it was escaping, and being saved, and escaping again. Plus a good night’s sleep, even if she had to have a human to do it.
The plaid shirt in the colors of Sky Patrol came off, leaving him with only the tucked-in white t-shirt. Talyarkinash pulled some strange medical device out of a drawer and held it out. With her other hand, she grabbed his wrist and turned his arm over.
She touched the inside of his forearm briefly. It was more like a puppy’s lick than anything, and then she pulled it back.
Gareth looked down and realized that it had left a tiny, red spot. Had she just drawn blood? That painlessly? That quickly?
There was another invention to take home, if he ever could.
The machine beeped after a few seconds. Talyarkinash hmmm-ed a bit and read some readout.
Rather than speak, she put it down on the counter and began to pull vials out of the farthest-right refrigerator. From underneath Talyarkinash pulled out a small crucible and a pair of eyedroppers.
It all looked incredibly sciency.
First, she poured some of a vial into the crucible. Then she added exactly three drops from the second bottle. The second eyedropper went into the side of the first device, and came out filled with a bright red fluid.
Blood? Wow.
“Ready?” she asked, looked up at him with an unexpected smile.
Gareth smiled back and nodded.
Talyarkinash dropped a single drop of Gareth’s blood into the crucible, and stirred it with a glass rod that had appeared from somewhere when he wasn’t looking.
At first, it started to steam a little.
And then a lot.
Before Gareth knew what was happening, the sides of the crucible cracked and the mixture inside poured out and started to melt the surface of the counter.
When Talyarkinash managed to splash it with some fresh water from the sink, it had eaten a disk about an eighth of an inch into the surface, which looked like a plastic of some sort.
“Fardel,” she whispered under her breath.
Gareth felt like he should blush at this point, to listen to a lady curse in public.
“Everything okay?” he ventured, unsure of his footing.
She looked up and there was almost no color in her eyes, just slitted-open irises like it was all black to bottom of her soul.
She sucked a loud breath in and blew it out.
“Had that been my blood, Gareth, or Morty’s, or anybody else’s, there would have been the slightest puff of steam,” she explained. “Just enough to see, but you might miss it if you blinked. Normally, the second experiment is to do the same thing in a genetic spectrometer to see where we might manage adjustments, if someone had any space left.”
“Okay?”
“I didn’t do this with Maximus,” she continued. “We were just upgrading him slightly by causing him to resize into a Vanir, so it was a simple enough cut and slice job.”
“Cut and slice?” Gareth felt his hair want to stand on end.
“I program a virus like a phage, Gareth,” she looked up in deadly seriousness, even if the meaning of some of the words eluded him. “Once we inject it, it infects every one of your cells and reprograms them to make you someone else. In the case of Maximus, he went to sleep for a few hours, and then ate like a horse for a week as his body suddenly grew a foot and he put on almost a hundred pounds of mass. After that, I never saw him again, but Morty and Xiomber said they did something similar to raise his IQ to genius levels.”
“But we aren’t stopping there,” Gareth observed.
“We’re not,” Talyarkinash agreed nervously. “Especially with all the changes I needed to program. This goes well beyond just making you Vanir-sized, since I need to program the changes with a morphic level clear out at the limits of anything anybody has ever done.”
Gareth reached out and took her hand before she could pull it back.
“This is necessary,” he said. “I understand that you might kill me accidentally in the process. It might be the single dumbest idea I have ever had, but it was the only context I could find for myself to encompass what I needed to stop Marc from taking over the entire galaxy.”
“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” she asked in a quiet voice.
“No,” he said. “I’m sure it is probably suicidal. But I don’t know any other way to handle it. And the clock is running.”
Warlord
“That fool should consider himself lucky that he didn’t get away from the police,” Marc snarled as Maiair finished her report. “He had the human dead to rights, and let Dr. Liamssen shoot him? Let him rot in prison. Make sure nobody posts bail for that fool. If someone does, I want them both brought to me in chains.”
“As you command,” Maiair replied, turning to signal to her younger sister with the message to convey.
Once the younger woman was gone, Marc was alone with the older in his outer chamber. He moved to the table and took a seat, gesturing for her to do the same. Normally, he would enjoy a glass of wine right now, but he was too angry for that to settle him.
This was why he needed to go get some of his old gang, even if he had to break them out of prison. He knew of the perfect tool for a jailbreak. However, right now he was surrounded by fools that would rather talk than shoot. Cleveland Eddy and Two-gun Kowalski wouldn’t have made that mistake.
“What do we know about Talyarkinash Liamssen?” he asked, rubbing his eyes in frustration.
“Best in the field,” Maiair replied. “At least among those willing to work for us under the table. Probable a few better geneticists out there, but not that much better.”
“Make your plans on the assumption that the man coming after us is my size and at least as smart as me,” Marc warned her.
“As smart?” Maiair asked.
“She’s the one who did my physical structure, Maiair,” Marc said. “Morty and Xiomber did the programming that upgraded my mind. At a minimum, you’re now facing me, but as a cop.”
“Then we might have a problem, boss,” she said carefully. “You’ve managed to whip the rest of the gang into shape, but in doing so, you’ve intimidated the hell out of them. Which was a good idea at the time. Will another human echo that and cause them to freeze up? We don’t know what happened to Cheepsath. He might have frozen, thinking about facing a human.”
Marc sighed.
“That’s my one fear here,” he said. “Having to rely on a gang I didn’t build, to go up against the most competent, most capable enemy I’ve ever known. Once I get past you, your sister, and Zorge, I’m not sure how many more managers I’ve got, versus a lot of make-weight street criminals.”
“Managers?” Maiair asked, at a loss.
“This organization is going to have to get much bigger, Maiair,” Marc replied. “And soon. We’ll have to come out of the shadows at some point.”
“But we are the shadows, Marc,” she said, headcrest bobbing in confusion. “Why would we come out?”
“Because I’ve got bigger plans than just ruling Zathus’s underground, Maiair,” he explained. “At some point, we need to take over the whole godforsaken planet. We’ve already made a good start on that, with corrupt politicians we can bend.”
“What’s your ultimate goal, Maximus?” Maiair asked, headcrest now fully up and puffed sideways a little bit. Not challenging, but fierce.
“Taking over the entire Accord of Souls, Maiair,” he said simply, saying it out loud for the first time.
“How in the nine hells do we do that?” she probed, headcrest puffing even more sideways with energy.
“I have a check list, actually,” he said with a small laugh. “Fringe benefit of a bigger, faster brain. Who to turn. Who to kill. Things like that. At some point, I plan to import some of my old killers from Earth and their families, and start a new government.”
“Would you make them Vanir, like you?” she asked carefully.
“No,” Marc understood where her mind was going. “We’ll leave them as humans. That way, the Vanir can still fight them on relatively even terms: Vanir might against human ruthlessness. The only real advantage the Vanir and other species will have over the next millennia will be numbers, because I won’t bring that many humans over. Who knows where I’ll be in a thousand years.”
“Won’t you be dead, Maximus?” she asked. Her headcrest had bobbed back down again. It was better than watching eyes and mouth on a human, to read their internal monolog.
“Not if all goes to plan,” he explained. “The Chaa never programmed limits into humans. Why bother, since we were still stone-age cavemen, little better than animals, when they left. No, I will need a few geneticists to work on a project I have in my head, but I should be able to live forever.”
“What about the rest of us?” Maiair asked.
The way she said it left a question in Marc’s mind, but Maiair was a Warreth. Not the sort of creature he was interested in, except as a means to an ends.
Still, he fixed her with a stern gaze.
“You’ll have as much responsibility as you can handle,” he said. “For as long as you can handle it. That’s decades, for your kind. I’m just sorry we can’t do anything to extend that.”
Her headcrest collapsed. Her head hung as well.
This creature couldn’t have been hoping he would make her immortal, as well? Perhaps more? Did she think he needed a Warreth empress to rule with?
Marc’s mind flitted back to the one woman who might have been a perfect queen, a decade ago. Before she made her choice. Maybe one of these days he might bring Philippa Loughty, the little maid of the lake, here, just so he could show her what a bad decision it had been, picking Gareth Dankworth over Marc Sarzynski.
If the machines were still available, he might have even chosen to bring her here now, just so she could be there when he finally caught up with the man and finished him off.
Perhaps another day.
But he would need to return home and scout for a future wife at some point. Someone he could turn into the physical form of a Vanir, while he made the changes she would need to breed up the generation of advanced humans he would need as a new nobility for the star empire he envisioned. Which he planned to rule forever.
But first, he needed the loyalty of his closest people.
“Maiair,” he said softly, causing her head and headcrest to come up some. “I would grant you immortality, if I could. And we’ll look into what gaps your genetic bonds have to improve you. I fear that the Warreth generally got the short end of that stick from the Chaa, along with the Tree People and the Borren. But who knows what we might be able to do with human science thrown in.”
That brought some color back to her eyes. Some luster to her feathers. As much as he could do, for now.
It wouldn’t do to alienate the very criminals he needed.
At least not until he didn’t need them anymore.
Once he had enough humans to rule the rest, all bets were off.
Square One
Eveth was beginning to develop a deep and abiding antipathy towards Olehmmishqu. It was still a beautiful place, well ordered and filled with wonderfully-grand buildings and park. They were close to the river today, running down a tip that had turned out to be a miscommunication about a Moisa hairdresser. Or an old enemy with an axe to grind.
Because right now it was the people of this town that were driving her a little crazy.
Since the local police had put out a full description of the Nari scientist, Dr. Liamssen, she and Grodray had been overwhelmed with tips and leads, all of them leading to dead ends.
Grodray had made a few calls, and the Constabulary had dropped a number of officers into place around the fringes of the investigation as help, but kept things exceptionally quiet, otherwise. According to her partner, she was getting as much rope as she wanted to buy, until she decided to throw in the towel on this one.
The city was reasonably well locked down, but there were still over three million sentient creatures to watch coming and going. Any Nari, Vanir, or Yuudixtl in an auto-taxi or taking a ferry got a second look, to make sure it wasn’t one of their four quarry making a run for it. All that had happened so far was that a number of innocent civilians were being inconvenienced for reasons nobody would explain.
Most of the officers involved couldn’t anyway.
Worse, the words of that dumb punk kept coming back to haunt her.
A camera on the back of a smoke shop had caught enough audio to be cleaned up and useful. The man had known about the human. And worked for someone called Maximus, which was a new name circulating, one connected with some sort of crime ring thought to operating out of Zathus.
And the human had a name now. Gareth.
But she was under observation by those same criminals. Her, personally.
Someone on the inside was feeding the thugs her itinerary. Had been for several days. Possibly, any clues that might be good ones were being filtered out by corrupt members of the local police.
Who could she trust, besides Grodray?
This Gareth fellow had tried to suggest to the crooked doctor that they were on the same side.
A human? Please. Got a sued spaceship you want to sell me?
“Let’s lunch,” Eveth offered as they walked out of the latest office and back onto the main street.
The river itself was two blocks over, just past a long park fronted by a variety of interesting restaurants with sidewalk dining. But she wanted an inside table today.
Grodray raised an eyebrow, but nodded and gestured for her to lead.
She found a Borren-homeworld-style café, heavy on fish in cream sauces, that had the layout she wanted. Asked for and received a booth clear at the back, as far from the restrooms as possible. Got far enough away from anyone that nobody would ever have a need to get close enough to eavesdrop.
Had even flashed her badge quietly when asking to be seated away from everyone.
It was as much privacy as she could get on short notice.
“What’s up, Baker?” her partner asked as they got their orders taken.
Food wouldn’t be long, as they were on the early end of lunch and had the place almost completely to themselves.
“I’m not sure our communications or our investigation are secured,” she said simply.
“The information we’re getting makes no sense unless someone is filtering things before they get to me. Normally, we would have several decent leads, none of which was critical, but all pointing in the same rough direction. We’ve gotten nothing here.”
“I agree,” he nodded. “Asked a few friends to look into some things without sharing with the locals.”
“You think the local Constabulary is bent?” she pursued.
“No,” he replied. “The police probably are, given how much underworld activity we seem to keep finding. They should have kept the place cleaner if they were doing their jobs. My gut says that we have a couple of bad apples inside our organization.”
“You never listen to your gut, Grodray,” she snapped.
He actually smiled at that. A twinkle came into his eyes that she had rarely seen before.
“Let’s hope they believe that as much as you do, Eve,” he grinned. “A reputation is a powerful thing, especially if you can lead folks astray with it. So, what do we do to shake things up?”
“I want to rattle some cages,” Eveth replied. “Liamssen disappeared, which suggests that she planned ahead, and had help. We need to find who might have helped her set up her escape plans. What have we got that we could offer a low-level punk to roll on someone?”
“If we could trust the prosecutors on this planet, I would say we could offer some punks sentencing bargains for information,” he noted. “But I don’t know which ones are the safe ones. I can promise you that a couple of forensic accountants will be making unannounced visits in the near future.”
“What do they do?” Eveth asked, lost at the term. Forensics and Accounting seemed miles apart.
“They follow money around,” Grodray smiled. “How it comes in, when it comes out, where it goes, how it comes back. Most criminals aren’t smart enough to hide their tracks well enough from those sorts of Prime Investigators.”
Prime Investigators. The true free agents. Had her partner called in some favors from old friends at that level? Was it that necessary? Were things that bad?
Eveth wondered if the Accord of Souls was closer to tottering than she had ever suspected. She had always thought that crime was just a little worse than it used to be. Maybe she needed to go back generations and compare? Was that something a Prime Investigator might do?
“Okay, so we can find corrupt politicians and the people holding their puppet strings,” Eveth said. “But that’s still going to take months. I have a feeling we have days at most. Liamssen is a geneticist. That suggests they plan to recast their human so he can hide. What do we know about human genetics?”
Or rather, what did you know that you haven’t been able to tell me before, but which might be utterly critical right now, Jackeith?
She saw Grodray do a lot of processing quickly, from the way his eyes shifted back and forth on some invisible horizon.
Finally, those internal voices reached some consensus.
“This is Level-7 stuff, Eve,” he began slowly. She nodded with the gravity of that pronouncement. “Humans are not part of the Accord of Souls. Were never modified by our ancestors, the Chaa. They look like smaller versions of the Vanir, Those Left Behind, but that’s just convergent evolution, we think.”
“Okay,” she said, holding her breath.
“Most geneticists can work with basic things,” he continued, pausing to glance over his shoulder to make sure they were along. “Fix problems at birth. Alter hair or skin or feather color. That sort of thing. Non-threatening to galactic order.”
“What about the humans, Grodray?”
“There might not be any limitations on them, Eve,” he said quietly. “They might be a blank slate onto which a geneticist with a lot of skill and no scruples might be able to paint.”
“So those killers…”
“Might be turned into one of us easy enough,” Grodray nodded. “Vanir are the closest match, if you want to hide. Plus you add size and mass to an already dangerous species. Look at what that human was able to do to you in his native form. Now make him my size with those muscles.”
“Would she stop there?” Eveth asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Would a criminal geneticist just stop at making him Vanir, Grodray?” Eveth asked. “If there are no limits, would she go crazy? Most doctors have some level of god-complex, trying to either make the world a better place, or prove that they are smarter than everyone else. What might she do?”
Again he turned to look out of the booth. Nobody was anywhere close.
“Six months ago, we had suspicions that Cinnra, on Zathus, was trying to get himself a human killer,” Grodray said. “Not long after that, about two months ago, Cinnra was dead and there was a new boss. One nobody had heard of before. A renegade Vanir, according the very little we’ve been able to piece together.”
“A modified human?” she gasped.
Grodray shrugged meaningfully.
“And somebody in the gang went and got themselves a cop, to try and stop this Maximus?” Eveth leapt into the darkness. “But they’ll need to upgrade him to a Vanir as well. Will they stop?”
“That’s why we’re functionally acting like Prime Investigators on this, Eve,” her partner said, deadly serious. “Go wherever the crime takes us, without being Prime Investigators, because that might attract attention.”
“Are you really just a Senior Constable, Jackeith Grodray?” she asked, making another intuitive leap.
Another grin. But not a no. Or a yes.
“Then we’re back to the top,” she said. “I don’t think we have time to do anything but kick over an anthill and see what happens. If Maximus is really a disguised human, and Gareth is about to become a Vanir, we’re potentially facing a war among literal gods, right here on our beat. You need to find me a door I can kick in.”
His eyes got a faraway look to them, like he was checking files for the right address. Someone that wasn’t normally worth rousting, or maybe a criminal he knew about, because those were easier to keep track of.
Instead of answering, he pulled out his pocketcomm and dialed.
“Yeah, me,” he said to whoever answered.
Pause.
“I want a name,” Grodray said. “Someone at mid-level that is wired in enough to give me the information I want when my crazy partner has him dangling out a window by one ankle.”
Longer pause. Probably some hemming and hawing at the other end. Like maybe she already had that sort of reputation on Orgoth Vortai and someone might know that.
She had never actually let go. But it made a fantastic threat, when a woman who was bigger than you could hold you by one leg, upside down, over a thirty-foot-drop.
“And remember, you’re the one signing this check,” Grodray added his own threat when he got an answer.
If whoever it was wasn’t on the level, Jackeith Grodray might be coming for them next. With an angry partner in tow.
Food arrived as he hung up, so he sat silently, but she could see that twinkle in his eyes again.
When they were alone, and he checked, the man smiled like a shark spying a wounded seal.
“I might have someone for you, Eve,” he said.
Good.
She had to stop two gods from destroying the Accord of Souls. And she absolutely had to do it tonight.
Awakening
Gareth was back in the dentist chair. The walls were brown, so he knew he hadn’t fallen into a nightmarish dream, reliving those few days in the other chair, being slowly eaten by the psionic drill.
Talyarkinash was in the other room, tuning things as well as she could.
She had gone as far as her extensive experience and creativity could take her, she had told him. And he believed her, having watched quietly all day as the woman alternatively calculated and cursed under her breath.
They both felt the pressure coming to a head. Angry people out there were looking for their scalps, and he had only one option to protect this woman who had come to trust a human.
“Gareth, are you ready?” she said over the intercom.
“I am,” he said, taking a deep breath.
“Stand by.”
The chair grabbed him in iron bands. Wrists, shins, chest, head. He was back in that technological iron maiden, waiting for the mad scientist to press the door shut on him.
“I wish I could say otherwise, but this is going to hurt,” she offered an early apology. “Normally, we would space the six injections out over as many days, with stops to monitor your medical condition and feed you a proper, balanced diet. But as you know, they could kick in the door at any moment.”
Lunch had been everything left over from dinner, plus a can of pasta and some canned fruit, until he felt like he would explode if he took another bite.
“I understand, Talyarkinash,” he replied. “Thank you for doing this my way. I can handle pain. I am Earth Force Sky Patrol. There is no other choice. And if it fails, keep notes so you can fix it for the next agent you recruit, because we both know nobody in the Accord can stop him.”
“I will, Gareth,” she said quietly. “And thank you for last night. I really needed a friend.”
Gareth started to say something. Started to blush. But she must have hit the button as she spoke, because something tapped him on the left shoulder, the one closer to the heart, and suddenly his entire body was on fire.
He might have screamed. Wanted to. Told his lungs and throat to carry through, but his body was no longer his to command.
Instead, Gareth was composed of a roaring fire that someone else was trying to extinguish with acid. Every nerve. Every muscle. Every neuron.
Gareth could never remember experiencing a tenth, even a hundredth as much pain. Diving across death pressure without a helmet, in order to save the ship from detonation, hadn’t hurt as much.
His eyes were on fire now, or perhaps his optic nerves were slowly being eaten by miniature piranha, one angry bite at a time.
After an eternity measured in the lifetime of stars, the pain seemed to ebb.
Gareth found he could think again. His throat was raw, but that might have been the screaming he was hoping he was able to do. His arms and legs felt like wet spaghetti sliding off a plate.
“Gareth?” the Angel of Death called his name. “Can you hear me?”
No, not the Angel of Death. Retribution, perhaps.
That would make her Nemesis, the bringer of retribution. Except that was his job.
The helmet retracted and Gareth found that he could see again.
He looked up and saw Talyarkinash’s azure eyes staring down at him with concern.
Yes, he had become Nemesis. That would in turn make her the goddess of night, Nyx.
He rather enjoyed that thought.
“Are you okay?” she seemed to be asking.
Gareth nodded and grunted, not quite willing to trust his tongue right now.
“Good,” she continued. “Because somebody just kicked in the door to my apartment, across the hallway. We’ve run out of time.”
Closing The Trap
“We’ve got them,” she said as Marc let Maiair into the other chamber.
Yooyar was with her, and both had their headcrests at full display. Marc was pretty sure what that signified among the Warreth, but now was really not the time.
“Where?” he asked. “And are you sure?”
There had been a couple of false alarms so far today. Those two Constables were getting progressively less communicative with the local cops, which suggested that they had finally figured out what was wrong. Probably, they were on the verge of cleaning up the local police and Constabulary, which would seriously dent his operations on this planet, but that was a problem for tomorrow.
Today, he needed to kill Gareth Dankworth. After that, he had time to put longer-term plans into action.
“We leaned extra heavy on someone who should have told us sooner,” Yooyar said with the sort of grim tone that suggested she just might be capable of killing in cold blood, which made her a rarity in the Accord of Souls. If she could do that, he would have as much work for the young Warreth as she wanted to undertake. “When we threatened to hand him over to the cops, he gave us an address. Supposedly, around two years ago Liamssen hired him to build her a secret lab not far from the university campus.”
“Good,” Marc exclaimed. “If it really is the place, then we’ll turn him over to the Constables later for holding out on us now. If not, I want you to kill him. I’m done playing around and the stakes are too high right now.”
“Who do we take with us?” Maiair asked the million-credit-question.
Who did he trust, when he was about to take on a human? Maiair had been right. Most of the team he brought to Hurquar were only really dangerous to their own kind, those inside the Accord of Souls.
What he really needed were killers. Men he had used back on Earth.
This group would have to do.
“Get me a driver who knows his stuff,” Marc commanded. “You two, plus Zorge. Bring stunners only, as I may need to torture information out of the four of them later, and I want them all alive for now.”
Yooyar nodded and departed. Maiair waited an extra second, as if about to say something, before she nodded and departed as well.
The way the women had reacted to the word torture just exacerbated the difference between the human, ruling caste he would need to build later, and the pitiful pacifists that had inherited the galaxy from those people who really should have done something about humans fifty thousand years ago.
That, or they needed to come back now and set it to right.
The failure of the Chaa to stop him was evidence enough to Marc that he was indeed destined to live forever and rule the galaxy as a newly-born god.
Ant Hills
Eveth had taken the time to change before they set out. She was back in the blue-gray bodysuit, covered over with armored scales and sporting a holster for her pistol on her left thigh. The blue ring over her heart seemed to be filling her with white-hot plasma from the surface of a star. Grodray had changed too, but he had gone the full route, including the white, dress beret and tunic over the top of his armor, so that made him look like the good cop.
That was okay. Eveth was angry enough already. And Grodray had said they were acting as Prime Inspectors on this case. That meant she had a great deal more leeway on rules and regulations than a mere Constable.
Time to put that to the test.
The auto-taxi had dropped them on a side street not far from the main tourist area, down by the river. They had eaten lunch not a mile from here, but by night it was an entirely different world.
Neon signs competed for attention Music pulsed a low, rumbling bass she could feel in her sternum, even from here. There was a line of people at the door, waiting for one of the bouncers protecting the joint to let them in, assuming they passed the requisite coolness test inherent in clubs like this.
“That’s it?” she asked, nodding the direction of the target as they came around the corner. The music hit her like a wet towel.
Grodray just nodded.
“What exactly are you planning to do, Eve?” he asked in a simple voice, falling into stride with her as she moved.
“Kick over an anthill, Jack,” she smiled back, almost biting her lip with anticipation.
No more deduction. No more intuitive leaps into the darkness. Just heads that needed cracking together.
She approached the line and went around the rope holding the unwelcome at bay.
Two of the bouncers in black shirts at the front door were Nari. Big specimens of determination that probably intimidated the hell out of tourists and artists. The one in the middle was a Vanir. He was maybe Grodray’s height, and had lots of mass, but much of it was turning into a pot belly around the middle.
Eveth flashed her badge as she got close and slipped it into her thigh holder so it was out of the way and her hands were clear.
“You can’t go in there,” the fat guy said. “It’s a private party.”
“Stop me then,” Eveth said.
Apparently, they bred them dumb on Hurquar, or wherever this guy was from. He actually reached out and tried to grab Eveth’s shoulder as she walked by him.
It had been a day. A whole week of days like this.
Eveth grabbed the hand on her right shoulder with her own right hand. She twisted it forward hard as she kept walking, forcing him sideways and down if he didn’t want his arm broken.
One of the two Nari looked like he might want to cause trouble, until a stun pistol appeared in his face, at the other end of a long, Vanir arm belonging to her angry partner.
“Official business,” he said, invoking the kinds of dread-bringing words that would get the other two thrown in jail for weeks until Grodray or Eveth decided they had suffered enough embarrassment.
Interfering with a Constabulary investigation was a felony everywhere, just for situations like this.
Both Nari turned white around the eyes. Ears went flat against skulls and the two men backed away.
Eveth would have expected to see tails tucked under, if they weren’t wearing baggy pants.
She turned her attention to the big guy, still trying not to have a broken arm. He had a look about him of a bully boy. Just the kind of guy you wanted at the front door of a club like this. She twisted a little more, and he was on his knees.
Eveth pulled her spare handcuffs from a belt pouch and hooked this bastard to the door handle. The only way he was going anywhere without her now involved a cutting laser, patience, and a high pain threshold.
Grodray nodded his approval.
Inside, the wall of sound was almost a painful experience. Eveth wondered what subsonics might be bathing the crowd in emotional manipulation, but it wasn’t her problem.
She looked to the right, and saw a crowd pressed up against a long bar like a rising tide. On the left, tables filled with sweaty patrons. In the middle, a dance floor and a light show so bright it might constitute an optical assault.
The door she wanted was on the far side, back on the left, near where risers went up to tables in the back with a good view.
Two more goons protected it as she wended her way through the mob, not exactly elbowing folks out of her way, but taking full advantage of the smaller species around her, who couldn’t resist her angry mass.
Another Nari guarded this door, with a Grace on the other side. Both wore the same black shirt of security employees, and had noted her approach with concern bordering on hostility.
Eveth smiled as she got close enough for the men to move to block the door. With one hand, she flipped open the wallet with the badge. With the other, she drew her pistol and pointed it at the one on the left. Grodray’s pistol was there a split-second later, like he had known how this was going down.
Maybe he secretly was a Prime Investigator, hiding out with the little people?
“Your choice,” Eveth yelled over the music.
The Grace nodded and backed down first, sliding across from the doorway and more or less pushing the Nari against the wall and whispering something in his ear as he did.
Like what a really bad idea it might be to resist the angry, giant woman with a badge and a gun.
Through the door the sound fell to a dull echo in the middle distance. The walls were rough wood covered over with old concert playbills, and the floor badly scuffed tile. Eveth passed a kitchen that extended behind the wall on the bar side, and then a blank space that was probably the back of the restrooms.
The hallway ended in a wooden door, older than the hills, and with a name on it in gold letters. The name Grodray had gotten for her earlier.
She had always wanted to do this, but it had never been an option, even in this line of work.
Without breaking stride, she stepped up and kicked the handle with all the anger she had accumulated since she came to this planet, shattering the strike panel out of the frame and a good chunk of wood from the door.
Inside, a fat Grace was talking on the telephone and looked up with a surprise that turned his tentacles nearly white.
“I’ll call you back,” he said. “Something just came up.”
The rest of the office was empty. Just the short, fat man behind a battered desk, two chairs, and wall-to-wall pictures of famous people who had been here or played the club at some point in their careers.
Eveth still had the gun in her hand, so she sat in the nearer chair and smiled at him.
“I want information,” she said primly. “You have three options. One: you can just tell me what I need. Two: you end up spending the rest of the night and maybe a week or two in jail while badly-misfiled paperwork gets untangled.”
Pause.
“What’s option number three,” he asked, falling for it like any good straight man.
“You have to stop at the hospital first,” she smiled.
Confrontation
Gareth was in no shape to fight, but he had no choice. He stumbled upright as Talyarkinash put his arm around her neck and wobbled with him towards the door.
A crash nearby signaled the secret door being broken open, and suddenly there were people pointing guns at him.
Gareth tried to manage his drunkenness, but his body was only vaguely under his control at this point. He recognized two Warreth females, both holding what looked like stun pistols pointed at he and Talyarkinash. Both women were cherry-red, with the taller one having black and white highlights and the shorter one having mostly yellow underplummage.
A Vanir male entered a second later. He was magnificent. At least seven-foot-four and built like a linebacker. Handsome face with dark, curly hair covering the man’s head. He seemed to be familiar.
“It looks like we’re too late to stop her from upgrading you,” the man said in a cruel voice. “But that just means that I’m not too late to stop you.”
He smiled down at Gareth, but it was more of a sneer.
After a moment, Gareth finally recognized the man. The scale had thrown him off.
Intellectually, he had known it was a fact, but coming face to face with it was something entirely else.
“Hello, Marc,” Gareth said slowly, trying to sound more coherent than he was. “Or should I call you Maximus now?”
“Either will work, old friend,” Gareth’s worst nightmare smiled. “Welcome to the Accord of Souls.”
And then the bastard shot him.
Overlord
Marc smiled as the bolt took Dankworth square in the chest. For good measure, he shot the woman as well. Stunners were a cheap way to handle prisoners.
“Find the other two,” he ordered brusquely.
It became clear within moments that Morty and Xiomber weren’t anywhere in the suite of rooms, and there were no more hidden doors to blow open. Nothing but this operating theater, a control room, and a small lab, and no indication a pair of Yuudixtl had ever been in here.
In a way, that made it worse, because it suggested that those two knew he was going to catch up with Liamssen and Dankworth, and had already moved on, probably hoping to find another Field Agent from Earth Force Sky Patrol, or maybe even a Special Agent.
He couldn’t put any of his other plans into action until he had cauterized this wound. And now he might have to start over.
How long had those two been planning to betray him?
“The place is empty, Maximus,” Maiair confirmed. “What’s next?”
“You two grab her,” he said, pointing at the doctor on the floor of the operating theater. “Bring her along to the truck. I only gave them a medium stun, but they won’t be conscious for at least thirty or forty minutes. Then I need to know where the other two are.”
“What about the human?” Yooyar asked.
“I’ll bring him myself,” Marc said.
It was almost like picking up a ten-year-old child, using his enhanced muscles to lift up the man who had once been his best friend and toss Dankworth over a shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
“What about the rest?” Maiair pressed.
Marc looked around at the space. There was no way to hide the kicked in front door of the other suite, nor the destroyed hidden door between the two flats. It would only be a matter of time until someone called the police, and the place would be crawling with badges.
Still, he had the doctor. He could get what he wanted out of her before he killed her. And still had enough connections to the authorities to get copies of her files once the police impounded them. He was pretty sure all of the corrupt locals he owned would be in jail fast enough as a result of this fiasco, but not before he could get that much out of them.
“Leave it,” he decided. “I’ve got what I really need.”
The girls were gone first, lugging the Nari traitor between them. Zorge was covering the front door when Marc emerged from the bathroom with his own burden.
“So that’s him?” Zorge tsked. “Doesn’t look like much.”
“Neither would you, stunned,” Marc snapped. “This man, this human, is orders of magnitude more dangerous than you ever dreamed of being, Zorge. He might be the only person in the universe that could stop me.”
“Why haven’t you killed him, then?” the spymaster asked abruptly.
“I need to know what he knows first,” Marc promised. “After that, it’s a whole different ballgame.”
Getaway
Marc’s truck was right where he had left it, double-parked in a loading zone at the bottom of the short tower. The Accord wasn’t big on personally-owned vehicles, but there were always a few, so most buildings dedicated a couple of floors of the big towers to landing bays.
He had brought a simple panel truck tonight, painted on the outside with the name and phone number of a local plumbing service as a way to vanish into the scenery. Let the fools drive around in big, black limousines that screamed “I’m important. Somebody arrest me!”
He would settle for a quiet time in the shadows, building his power up until he could simply explode out and take what he wanted. Liamssen’s notes on what she had done to Dankworth would be invaluable for that.
What little extra did they think would give that man the edge he needed to take on Maximus?
The girls were carrying the rogue geneticist towards the back of the truck as he approached. Zorge had gone ahead and was sitting up front with the driver for the word to move.
Lights suddenly appeared at the near edge of the garage as an auto-taxi landed and deposited two figures on the balcony apron outside. Something about them just had Marc’s hackles up, so he crouched down, carefully setting Dankworth’s body behind a window-washing repulsor craft.
The two were Vanir, and the way the female walked just screamed cop as Marc watched. When she passed into the internal light from the darkness outside, Marc also saw the badge on her chest.
For a moment, his rage burned crimson at the thought he had been betrayed by someone in his organization, but he stopped himself cold. Cops looking for him would have surrounded the building with heavy teams and be storming the place right now, so maybe they had just gotten lucky tip and arrived too late to keep him from his prize?
“You there,” the woman cop yelled as she saw Maiair and Yooyar, carrying a body between them in unfortunate circumstances. “Stop and hands in the air. Police!”
One of the reasons Marc had chosen a Vanir as his final form, in addition to the amazing physical size, were the reflexes.
Warreth were gliders, with human-like upper arms that had been extended and flattened into wings that ran along past their hands. They were more like bats that way, and couldn’t truly fly, not like the Elohynn. But that latter race was a true hexapod, a body that could usually pass for human in dim light, plus wings like an angel, except they hinged down instead of up.
The two Vanir cops had guns out and pointed before either sister could even consider dropping their package. Zorge was up front, probably with the door closed. He would suddenly find a stunner in his ear, if he wasn’t paying attention.
And the cops were coming up at a bad angle for anyone in the cab to see them before it was too late.
Good thing Marc was sneakier than everyone else.
He pulled out his pistol and adjusted it to the highest settings. The beam attenuated with distance, and this would be a pretty long shot for a hand-held stunner. But he only needed to soften them up enough that they couldn’t evade follow-up shots.
“What’s going on here?” the woman cop yelled in an angry voice as she closed.
Her partner was a few steps back and to one side, concentrating on the rest of the garage and possible ambushes. Like Marc.
He decided to take the male first, trusting that he had enough cover to protect himself from the female cop. Yooyar would also be able to get involved if the cop stopped covering her.
Marc stayed perfectly still, aware that Vanir, like humans, had eyesight keyed to motion and color. He measured the shot in his head and watched the two cops come to rest, too far away for the sisters to attack them, but close enough to track everything happening with the truck.
The male risked a glance the other direction.
Marc exploded into motion, raising his pistol into view and triggering the shot almost before he had the barrel down, trusting that the gun itself needed a fraction of a second from the trigger pull to the primary coil energizing. About the same amount of time it took a bullet to exit a barrel under the high pressure of burning cordite.
The shot was a little high, but still tagged the male cop in the shoulder. Hopefully, it would be enough, because Marc was already tracking on the woman.
She was spinning in his direction, targeting on sound as her eyes searched for him.
Time slowed to molasses on a Nova Jersey winter day.
Marc fired.
She fired.
Marc felt the brush of her stunner, like the kiss of a tree branch whipping by, but most of it went into the vehicle in front of him. Still, his eyesight grayed out for a moment.
He fired a second shot blind. Memory said he had gotten her harder than she had gotten him, with that first shot, but he had never seen anyone with reflexes as good as his.
He needed an Empress like her, one of these days, but a modified human. Still, he had a pattern upon which to base that future wife, if he got out of this situation alive.
A third shot rang out as Marc’s vision cleared.
A fourth.
Silence.
Marc managed to make out the scene.
The cop was unconscious. Both cops.
Maiair had gotten her pistol out and taken both cops down by herself, once he had distracted them.
Marc made a note to pay better attention to the older Warreth sister. She was making herself look better and better as a potential second-in-command for the organization, just as her younger sister was turning into a dangerous gunsel.
Maybe he really did need a harem after all, as a way to bind them more fully to the throne he intended to create.
“Good job,” Marc said as he holstered his pistol and gathered up Dankworth’s body.
“What do we do with them?” Maiair asked, covering them with her pistol anyway.
“Bring them along,” Marc decided. “If they’re here, there’s a leak in the organization, and we need to plug it. I’ll find out what they know before we work on the other two.”
Marc deposited the Field Agent into the back of the van as Zorge emerged, eyes wide with surprise.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You missed all the fun, old man,” Yooyar’s sarcastic tones could have been used to paint a building.
“Constables?” Zorge inspected them as he helped Maiair lift the female. “How’d they find us?”
“That’s your job, Zorge,” Marc said coldly. “Find out who talked and have them brought to me for punishment.”
“Yes, sir,” the Nari spymaster nodded.
Marc pulled the unconscious male to the van and then lifted him inside, noting that the man was skinny, but still a solid block of mass. Older cop, wearing the insignia of a Senior Constable, what Marc would have called Detective Sergeant back home,
Nothing else was moving in the garage.
Before they lifted off, Marc pulled the pocketcomms from both cops and tossed them under a nearby car, aware of how easily they could be tracked, if someone was suspicious. The rest of their belongings went into a sack someone had grabbed: guns, badges, wallets, handcuffs.
Accord cops used cuffs that keyed on bio-signature, rather than the old-fashioned iron key. Marc assumed that a competent cop would put herself and her partner into the tiny, electronic brain, so using their own cuffs on them was a mere annoyance, rather than a useful tool.
Still, they would be out for a while. Long enough to get back to the warehouse he had been using as a base.
After that, he would have all the time in the world, and all sorts of interesting tools, to torture these four for all the information they had, like squeezing a sponge completely dry, before he discarded them onto the ashheap of history.
Prisoner
Gareth woke to pain. Millions of microscopic ants marching through his veins, biting him with every stride. Hot coals scorching his flesh on a slow smoker.
A groan escaped his lips.
“Ah, you are awake, my old friend,” Marc Sarzynski’s voice intruded on Gareth’s nightmare.
He tried to open his eyes, but the light in here stabbed his brain with icepicks.
Gareth squinted to the merest slits and tried to focus on something beyond the torture in his soul.
“Too bright?” Marc asked.
Gareth groaned again and nodded. Tried to. He wasn’t sure how much of what was happening in his mind made it to the nerves and muscles of his body.
Sudden darkness reached out and embraced him in coolness.
“Better?” Marc asked. “I remember when I first awakened, as the growth began to hit. Everything hurt and I was nearly blind.”
“Thank you,” Gareth managed to slur out.
“Anything for my oldest, dearest friend,” Sarzynski sneered. “We want you comfortable for what comes next.”
Gareth heard the emphasis on that last word and knew what Maximus had planned.
He had failed. They had been too late to get everything done and escape.
Or rather, Talyarkinash had done everything she could, but Gareth had needed more time for it to happen.
Time he had run out of.
Gareth managed to open his eyes enough to see, this time. Through the fire in his body, he understood that he was hanging from a pair of manacles holding his arms up, those in turn attached to an I-beam running horizontally on some sort of frame. Another pair gripped his ankles.
The space smelled like a shipping warehouse, all dusty and oils and dry. The ceiling was far overhead, with a crane on rails up there for lifting things out of railroad cars, just like home.
Gareth was on his knees, so he fought with his body to stand. It was like lifting the old Empire State Building, but he managed, hanging forward on the chains to find his balance and drive upwards.
He couldn’t stand right now. Not really.
But he wasn’t about to be on his knees for Marc Sarzynski.
A breath pulled down into the base of his stomach seemed to quell some of the fires coursing through his blood. His mind might have even cleared a little.
Gareth focused on breathing and learning to think again. This was worse than the hardest concussion he had ever sustained, and his head was ringing like a church bell in synch with his heart.
“My,” Sarzynski exclaimed. “You do look better already.”
Gareth managed to turn his head far enough to find Maximus, seated on a chair on a small platform, like a king on his throne. The rest of the royal suite stood around him, arrayed in layers of power and access, from the dumbest rookies at the edge of the crowd to the two Warreth women standing closest to Marc, the taller one whispering in his ear.
Gareth looked down and realized his favorite cowboy outfit was gone. Hopefully not destroyed, since he wasn’t sure who that tailor had been and wanted to go back soon for more wardrobe.
In its place, Gareth was wearing a long robe of a heavy, white linen. It hung long on his feet and wrists, as if it were for a Vanir, rather than a human. The white suggested something angelic, which was probably appropriate, given the roles he and Marc had chosen to play.
But the oversized nature also sent an important message. Sarzynski understood. Knew that Gareth would be growing as the various viruses worked their way through his body, reprogramming things and triggering all manner of changes. Hopefully, he would miss the important changes when focusing on the obvious.
“Are you ready to talk yet?” Marc asked a polite, even pleasant voice. “The others haven’t woken up yet, so I can’t put them to the question and find out what they know.”
“Why, Marc?” Gareth asked simply, as he managed to gain control of his mouth.
“Power, Gareth,” the man replied. “You had always managed to thwart me, back home, mister White Knight on a Charging Steed. Here, we are a whole new thing, and the Accord of Souls lacks the fundamental tools to prevent me from taking over.”
“Emperor Marc the First?” Gareth asked sarcastically.
“Indeed, old friend,” the criminal overlord smiled grandly. “I had even considered who I might need for an Empress…”
The way he left the phrase dangling left no doubt in Gareth’s mind as to whom Marc was referring.
“If you hurt her…”
“Relax, Dankworth,” Marc said. “She made her choice, and I honor that. She’ll make a lovely little housewife for you. Or would have. I will need a woman with grander dreams to create a new species of rulers here.”
Gareth had a better view of the crowd than Marc did. He watched the implications of those words ripple out, a pebble dropped into a still pond. Useful information, long term, but Gareth didn’t know how long he had. That Sarzynski hadn’t killed him already meant that there was something the man needed to know, and needed Gareth to supply it.
Knowing Maximus, the man would resort to torture at some point. Gareth steeled his soul to resist as long as he could.
Another deep breath and the fires seemed to bank, turning down to a small hearth of coals, just keeping him warm on a chill night rather than threatening him with a foretaste of hell.
“So what do you want, Marc?” Gareth even managed to sound calm, he thought.
“I want to watch you change, Gareth,” the man replied with a smile. “See what she did to you, so I can figure out what I might want to add to the current repertoire.”
Gareth followed Marc’s eyes and saw Talyarkinash strapped down to a chair off to one side, head lolling as she was still out cold. Beyond her, a pair of Vanir in steel-blue uniforms. Gareth looked close and recognized Constable Baker and her partner, also captured.
Only the brothers seemed to have escaped. Hopefully, they had enough money and connections to remain at large while they assembled another wormhole generator and sought more help. Nobody else in the Accord of Souls was left who could stop this madman.
“She made me a match for you, Marc,” Gareth said gruffly, turning his eyes back to his foe. “That’s what the Accord of Souls needed, after all. Someone who could stand in your path and say No.”
“Well, then you both failed,” Marc said. “Not even the strength of Samson will save you now. I will cut your hair and blind you, so you can listen to the others spill their secrets first, and then their blood.”
“Marc, you can just walk away, you know,” Gareth retorted quietly. “Take your little mob of pitiful losers and vanish back into the shadows. I’ll even give you a head start.”
“You think I should fear you, little human?” Marc voice suddenly turned to rage.
“Because if you hurt her, or the Constables, I promise that there will be no place in the galaxy or in hell that will save you from my wrath.”
“You don’t seem to understand, Dankworth,” Marc’s anger towered as high as the great ceiling overhead. “I’ve been waiting for this moment for years. I was always second best when you were around. Anything I did was almost, but not quite as good, as the great Gareth St. John Dankworth of the Earth Force Sky Patrol. Have you any idea what that’s like?”
“I wasn’t competing with you, Marc,” Gareth said simply. “I was simply trying to do the best I could. Trying to make the Solar System a better place. I will do the same with the Accord of Souls, since I can never go home now.”
“Fool,” Sarzynski thundered. “You’ll be dead.”
Gareth watched him rise from the cheap, imported throne, just an over-sized metal chair, and stomp down to ground level. The criminal gang around him had already fallen silent. Now they parted like the waters at his approach.
Maximus came close, but not close enough for Gareth to grab him. Still, Gareth got his first major shock. Marc Sarzynski was only half a head taller now, so Gareth had reached something like six-foot-nine as his body expanded under the force of all the chemicals and transformational virii.
A hunger took root at the bottom of Gareth’s soul, but it wasn’t just for nourishment.
This one was for justice.
“Now, you will watch what your foolhardy gambles have brought,” Marc snarled.
It felt like they were the only two people in the entire vast auditorium of the warehouse, the rest of the people hanging silent on pins and needles.
Gareth watched his foe stomp over to where Talyarkinash was strapped to the chair. A nearby table had been covered with a cloth, one that Marc pulled back now and cast from him.
Underneath, what looked to Gareth like the contents of surgical theater had been laid out in careful order. Gareth felt his stomach clench.
“Do I have your attention, Dankworth?” Sarzynski yelled angrily.
Without pausing for a response, Marc reached down and picked something up. Gareth struggled against the chains binding him as Marc stepped around behind the Nari woman, but the criminal did not touch her.
Instead, he snapped something and held it under her nose. Even from here, Gareth picked up the rank assault of the smelling salts.
Talyarkinash moaned and stirred, struggling weakly and vainly against the ties binding her to the chair.
“Good,” Marc said in a cruel voice. “You’re awake, Dr. Liamssen.”
It dawned on Gareth that he had never heard the woman’s last name, having been apparently on a first-name basis with her from the first moment. He would apologize to her later for his social failures.
“Whaa…” Talyarkinash fumbled to find a context.
“Welcome to my lab, traitor,” Marc continued. “I’m going to ask you questions, and you are going to answer them. If you don’t, I am going to use pain as a tool and an art form to slowly rip away your sanity, until I get what I want. If you please me, I might kill you quickly.”
“MAXIMUS!” Gareth roared across the space. “This is your last warning.”
“YOU DO NOT GIVE ME ORDERS, HUMAN!” Marc screamed back in a voice of cruelty that transcended human or Vanir.
Gareth watched the man pick up something from the table and step around behind the woman again, so Gareth that had an unobstructed view.
“My friend needs to understand his situation, doctor,” Marc hissed. “And I need you to understand that your only choice now is how much pain you will suffer before you tell me what I want to know.”
Gareth growled, low in his chest, as Marc held out the thing to Talyarkinash’s left arm. It was a fine-pointed, surgical knife, but Gareth wasn’t sure how he knew that from this far away. It should have appeared as a steel pencil, considering the distance.
“We begin,” Marc said in a voice dripping with venom.
He took the knife and turned it sideways.
Talyarkinash struggled, but she was bound too effectively to move anything but her ears.
Slowly, Marc ran it down the outside of her arm in a move that made no sense, until Gareth saw her fur fall away in a strip an inch wide and several inches long.
He and Marc locked eyes across the space for a moment, rage swirling back and forth like a storm’s tide. Lightning bolts of fury seemed to pass between them, at least in Gareth’s imagination
Marc turned the blade again and plunged it directly into Talyarkinash’s arm, right in the center of the bald spot, dragging it far enough to make a deep cut. Bright red blood welled up and began to drip.
Talyarkinash whimpered in pain.
Gareth saw more red, but this time it was in his soul. Anger, previously banked, waited no more. Those coals, calm and waiting at the center of his being, they were no longer quiet. Hot wind blasted them and they exploded into the sort of white heat necessary to forge steel.
The pain Gareth felt was worse than anything he had previously endured, but this was driven by wrath, not confusion.
Gareth squinted his eyes and howled. Felt the sound echo off the far walls of the warehouse as Marc smiled at him, pulling the blade free and wiping it clean on Talyarkinash’s tunic.
Gareth looked at his left hand now, the manacled arm closer to the heart, where six injections had forever altered his life.
Nothing would alter his soul, but the flesh of his hand seemed to melt under his gaze, showing the faintest tint of bronze as his fingers extended a little in the fury of a molten forge.
He looked back up at Marc and smiled.
Something had changed in the man’s face. Fear, perhaps, had taken root and begun to spread its tendrils.
”What are you doing?” Marc called in a voice twinged now with doubt, supplanting the towering anger that had been there a moment ago.
“Being born,” Gareth said simply.
He closed his eyes and reached down into the depths of his soul, plunging both hands into that pile of white-hot coals, seeking something. What he wasn’t sure.
Perhaps Excalibur.
Gareth had been raised on all the great martial tales of history: Arthur who was known as Pendragon. Saint George of Lydda, reputed to have slain a dragon, and Theodore of Amasea, another warrior for his faith. But others as well, including Bilbo who fought a dragon in his own way and lived to tell the tale.
All throughout the Western Literary canon were sprinkled great beasts who tormented men. Creatures known as dragons that had become receptacles of dreams of flight and fancy, powerful immortals who challenged men spiritually as often as they did martially. Symbols as well as monsters.
Gareth had no desire to face Samson’s fate, even as he considered the manacles binding his arms and legs to an iron frame. Nor would he accept the imagery of another man so bound, with the Spear of Longinus plunged into his side.
There was only one God, according to Pastor Jacob, and Gareth lacked the arrogance to challenge that notion, even as the desperate, criminal scientists of the Accord of Souls sought to make him over into one.
But he would accept a dragon as a powerful totem.
Gareth howled again as the fire crept out of his soul and immolated his physical form, Talyarkinash’s greatest success coming to flesh and fruition around him.
Dragonsong.
But this roar was not pain.
No, this was retribution.
Gareth turned his face on the rest of Marc’s gang and snarled his rage at them, watching them shrink beneath him as he did.
Except that they were staying the same size.
Gareth was growing. Elongating.
Transforming.
The four manacles shattered as he flexed mighty limbs, covered over now with bronze scales inspired by two scared Yuudixtl scientists, willing to risk everything to undo the evil they had unleashed on the galaxy.
Reptilian Pandoras trying to find Hope at the last.
Marc Sarzynski stood frozen in shock as he watched.
Gareth leapt into the air, trusting the instincts Talyarkinash had programmed as mighty wings unfolded from his back and began to beat. A tail swished behind him like a great rudder as he was suddenly airborne, racing towards the suddenly low-hanging ceiling overhead.
A sound below drew his attention. A stunner pistol firing. At him.
The range was too great for such a small weapon to be effective, but both of the Warreth women would not let that dissuade them. They continued to fire. A gray-furred Nari male joined in after a second.
Gareth had no interest in finding out if the weapons would stun his new form, but he also didn’t want to simply annihilate them all, as much as the beast in his breast called for it.
He banked at the far end of the warehouse and set his eyes on the array of species representing Sarzynski’s gang. Wings beat a tattoo on the sky and he dove, weaving back and forth to avoid the fire.
He would not kill them unnecessarily. Fear of dragons was a thing all humans seemed to be born with. Gareth hoped that these other species, who had already learned to fear a human, might acquire an even greater fear of a dragon.
He took a breath and opened his mouth, screaming pure fury at them like a physical assault.
Dragonfear.
They broke, scattering in mindless panic as they tried to find a door out of the building.
Anything to escape their worst nightmare made flesh before their very eyes.
“GARETH!” Marc screamed as Gareth pivoted on a wing and began a second pass.
Gareth found the man. He had not moved at all, except to grab Talyarkinash by the fur on the back of her head and pull it back to expose her throat.
“I’ll kill her,” he warned, almost touching her with the tip of that scalpel.
Gareth swung around in a tight arc, watching the rest of the gang flee, including the three with enough anger to shoot before. Just to make a point, he picked out a spot, high on a nearby wall, and trusted Talyarkinash again.
Fire erupted from his open snout, a great gout of flames that licked the wall and scorched it down to the metal in an instant, raising the temperature in the room several degrees as metal oxidized under that assault.
The rabbits ran even harder.
Gareth turned his attention back to Marc, holding a hostage he would kill, even knowing that Gareth could immolate him a moment later.
It was time to talk, finally.
Gareth circled one last time and swooped in to land, nowhere close to the one known as Maximus and his hostage, but instead crushing Marc’s throne under the immense weight of a twenty-meter-long dragon. One of mankind’s greatest terrors, soon to be something the criminals of the Accord of Souls learned to fear as well.
He felt his tail flicker angrily behind him, knocking things over with a variety of sounds. Rear paws had grown talons, which he dug into the wood of the small stage, splintering it loudly. Front paws came down and flexed as well. His wings folded to half-mast, not retracted, but not spread to full extension.
“What have you done?” Marc screamed, almost mindlessly.
“She made me into something that could stop you, Marc,” Gareth said in a voice that sounded like his own, down an entire octave of resonance and anger.
“You’re no longer human,” the man raged, amazed.
“Nor are you, Maximus,” Gareth replied coldly. “Remember that. You have chosen to become a Vanir, among your other enhancements. You are no longer human either.”
Gareth let his weight settle forward, like a cat resting, except he kept all four paws out for quick movement. His eyes had enough peripheral vision to see nearly the entire space of the warehouse behind him. He watched the last three, the dangerous criminals: the two Warreth and Nari, get to an outside door and flee into the night without once looking back.
Let them go. They had the fear of a dragon carved into their souls now. As he had intended from the start. They would take that with them and infect the entire underground with it, fighting half of his future battles for him.
“Stay back,” Marc threatened, jerking Talyarkinash’s head hard enough to elicit another yelp of pain from her. “I’m warning you.”
“I will make you a deal, Marc,” Gareth rumbled. “Put the knife down without hurting her and walk away. If you do not, you will never make it out of this building alive. But I will let you go, right now.”
“Let me go?” Marc’s mind seemed to have snapped. “What kind of a deal is that?”
“I will make you that promise on my honor, Marc Sarzynski,” Gareth said. “For old times’ sake. We were both members of the Earth Force Sky Patrol, once upon a time. You know what my word is worth.”
“Just walk away?” Marc asked, sanity creeping slowly back into his voice. “Just like that?”
“Just like that, Marc,” Gareth promised. “Tomorrow, I will begin to hunt you again, in earnest, but today you and your kind are free to go. The price is the lives of Talyarkinash Liamssen and the two Constables.”
“Your word?”
“Yes, Marc,” Gareth acknowledged.
Talyarkinash hissed in surprise when Marc Sarzynski suddenly let go of her hair. Gareth watched him step to the table and replace the knife he had picked up earlier, grabbing a bandage and strapping it around the oozing wound in the woman’s left arm.
Marc reached down and undid one of the straps holding her in place, freeing her right arm. He placed her hand over the bandage, so she could hold it in place.
Gareth held his breath as Marc Sarzynski, the criminal mastermind known as Maximus, turned to face him one last time.
“Until tomorrow, Gareth,” he nodded.
“Until tomorrow, Marc,” Gareth replied.
The Vanir warrior, who had once been his best friend, when they were both humans, turned and began to walk away.
“That’s it?” a new voice raged into the empty silence.
Gareth and Marc both turned to Constable Baker, apparently awake now. She must have been silently biding her time, but Gareth could understand.
“That’s it, Eveth Baker,” Marc said.
He turned and quickly made his way to an exit.
“You’re letting him go?” she turned and directed her bile up at Gareth.
“For now,” Gareth reassured her as the door slammed shut on Marx Sarzynski.
Carefully, he made his way down from the platform, kicking the uncomfortable, crushed remains of Sarzynski’s throne to one side as he did.
Gingerly, he reached out a giant paw and tugged as the bindings holding Talyarkinash to the chair, snapping them with the razor edge of his talon.
“It worked,” she said with an awe-tinged voice. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“No, Talyarkinash Liamssen,” Gareth replied. “Thank you for saving mine.”
“Release me,” Eveth Baker demanded as Talyarkinash rose and hugged Gareth’s serpentine neck with her good arm. “That bastard’s getting away.”
Gareth turned to the female officer, noting with interest that both of them were awake, and that the dangerous-looking man was watching with steely eyes even more interested than hers.
“Tell me, Constable Baker,” Gareth asked. “What is your word of honor worth?”
Constable
Gareth the Vanir looked up as the door to the hospital room opened, admitting Eveth Baker and Jackeith Grodray. He saw another pair of armed Constables guarding the room from the outside before the door closed again firmly.
Talyarkinash had been seated next to Gareth’s hospital bed, where she had been eagerly consuming some medical article on her pocketcomm. She put it down now and looked up expectantly.
Gareth considered the several empty dishes on the tray stretched across the bed. He hadn’t felt the need to be in a private clinic, but had been unable to convince anyone else that he felt fine.
At least they had been feeding him better food than he remembered from his previous hospital stay, and enough for three people. And he had been able to transform himself back into a human, well, a Vanir, although that had left him so exhausted that he had been at the mercy of the two cops. But they had only brought him here.
On each trip to the tiny restroom in the last three days, Gareth had measured his new, Vanir body against the door frame, until he had finally stopped growing.
Seven feet, four inches. Three hundred and forty pounds, but he would need to get back to the gym and PT soon. It had been almost two weeks since his last morning run around the gym level, back at The Arsenal. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and his hair was far too long for Sky Patrol regulations.
Eveth Baker was closer, with Grodray standing off to one side and a full stride behind her. Something about the man left Gareth concerned. The eyes were too bright, too knowing for a simple police detective.
“Some of them got away,” Baker began without preamble. “Maximus, Maiair, Yooyar, and Zorge being the most important to elude capture. We’ve caught many others. Your two helpers, Morty and Xiomber, have also vanished. For now.”
“For now,” Gareth agreed. “I only promised Maximus a one day head start, so he’s already gotten more than I bargained for.”
“You think you’ll be chasing after him, Dankworth?” she challenged.
“I am a Field Agent of the Earth Force Sky Patrol, Constable Baker,” he responded solemnly. “A cop, among other things. So yes, I’ll be going after him as soon as you let me out of this hospital bed.”
“How?” she asked.
“I can’t go back to Earth. Ever. That much is certain,” Gareth said. “I had to sacrifice everything, with Talyarkinash’s help, to do something crazy enough to defeat that man, however temporarily he escaped me afterwards. He becomes my next mission.”
“You’re not a cop here, Dankworth,” she noted angrily. “You are an illegally-enhanced, alien creature whose very existence is a crime.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That still doesn’t change my task.”
“And if we won’t allow it?”
“You let me know when you have someone who can stop Marc Sarzynski, Constable,” Gareth retorted. “Because nothing I’ve seen, read, or heard in the Accord of Souls suggests the sort of ruthlessness to fight that man nose to nose.”
“I could,” she suggested.
Gareth studied the woman for a second. Six foot seven. Built like an East German Olympic swimmer, with a long, feminine frame covered over with muscles.
And a brain like a computer.
“You might,” Gareth made a peace offering. “But I know how that man thinks. He was my best friend for many years before he turned to evil and lost himself. And you are at the top of what a geneticist like Talyarkinash here could do to improve you. Marc’s not. Especially now that he knows what lengths I was willing to go to in order to stop him.”
“You’re it, then?” Eveth sneered.
Gareth shrugged, and addressed his next words as much to the Nari scientist next to his bed, who had become his friend, as the cop looming over him now.
“If I could deliver you his head on a platter today, I would happily walk into a cell for the rest of my life tomorrow,” Gareth said. “Or ask you how to erase enough knowledge from my brain that you could shrink me back down and send me home. Until then, I might be the only thing standing between you and the darkness.”
He expected Baker to say something more, but her partner placed a silent hand on her shoulder.
Baker nodded and stepped to one side silently.
The Vanir man, Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray stepped up now, into her place.
“You don’t know our ways, Gareth,” he explained in a calm, deep voice.
Gareth shrugged again, rather than answer. That much was a given. He had been here for all of a week.
“Back home, you were a Field Agent of Sky Patrol, correct?” he asked.
“Correct,” Gareth nodded. “Only about a month ago, I got my third ring, and was all set to propose to the woman I loved, the night this all happened.”
Grodray nodded in turn, his face turning pensive and serious. He turned to the fourth person in the room.
“Dr. Liamssen,” Grodray began in a heavy voice. “You belong in the cell next to Gareth, and normally I would be happy to put you there.”
Talyarkinash surprised both of them by standing slowly. She couldn’t look the giant man in the eyes, but that was a physical thing, not a measure of her stature. Gareth felt a surge of pride in the woman.
“And?” she asked in a hard, unforgiving voice.
From the look on Grodray’s face, she might have gotten the same response, the same look on his face, had she just slapped him. Baker shared Gareth’s grin from behind the scene.
“Under the auspices of the Official Secrets Act, I can deputize you into a posse for purposes of supporting efforts of the Constabulary to fight crime, in extreme circumstances.”
Gareth had spent enough time around the Nari woman to measure her own shock at those words, ears flat backwards, pupils slitted all the way open, jaw hanging, fur on her neck and arms standing up.
Something niggled at the back of Gareth’s mind. He had spent the last three days eating, sleeping, and reading.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a concerned voice. “But I don’t believe that a Senior Constable has that authority. I don’t have the book in front of me to quote the statute, but I have been studying your manual.”
Grodray’s eyes got big. So did Baker’s.
After a moment, the man nodded once and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out his wallet. The badge inside was the standard blue ring of The Constabulary, but then the man opened what looked like a secret compartment to reveal a second badge, smaller and made of platinum.
Eveth Baker gasped.
“You would be correct, Gareth,” Grodray conceded carefully. “However, Senior Constable is a cover. I am actually a Prime Investigator with the Constabulary, something roughly equivalent to a Senior Special Agent with Sky Patrol. And that kind of person does have the necessary authority.”
Gareth nodded, his own jaw almost on the floor next to Eveth Baker’s.
“And under the Official Secrets Act, any disclosure of that information will result in a jail sentence of not less than ten years, so you have been warned.”
“How can I help?” Gareth asked. Then he turned to Talyarkinash to include her in the conversation. “How can we help?”
“My superiors have come to the same conclusions you have, Field Agent Dankworth,” Prime Investigator Grodray intoned seriously. “Your help will be necessary to stop Maximus and his gang, and to return some level of honest government to the systems of the Accord of Souls, where too many of them have become infected with corruption. We’re not sure how we’ll use you, yet, but you represent an entirely new option in our fight against crime.”
Gareth nodded.
The underworld had an overlord who had once been one of the most dangerous criminals in the Solar System in Marc Sarzynski.
The Constabulary would need a Star Dragon.
Flight of the Star Dragon An Earth Force Sky Patrol File: Solar Year 2387
Vanir
It had been a month since Gareth’s transformation. A month of looking at a new face in the mirror in the morning.
Talyarkinash had printed a picture for him, a photo taken back when he was still human. He had grown into his Vanir face, but it was still damnably odd, comparing the man he had become with the man he had been as recently as six weeks ago.
The ears were probably the hardest part to adjust to. On a human, they were rounder, both on the top and the bottom. His new Vanir ears were almost pointed at the top, like cartoon depictions of elves. Sleeker. Taller too, by maybe a whole inch.
Gareth couldn’t tell if it was new ears that had made his hearing any sharper, or all the other modifications that had come with what Talyarkinash had done to him, with the help of the two Yuudixtl scientists: Morty and Xiomber.
Similarly, his eyes were ever-so-much bigger as a fraction of his face. And wider, coming out to sharper corners that almost made him feel half-Japanese, if there was such a thing. Cheekbones had grown more angular, sharper planes than his more-rounded face and head had been.
At least the soft, blond beard covered part of his face, and blurred some of the changes. It had finally grown in enough that it stopped itching, but it still threw him off when he saw that person in the mirror.
It was Gareth St. John Dankworth. Field Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, Missile Division, 6th Cavalry Troop. Except it wasn’t, anymore.
Probably never would be again, unless something magical happened.
More magical.
More bizarre than all the things that he had seen since Morty and Xiomber pulled him through an illegal wormhole from Earth Force’s base in the Earth/Moon L2, The Arsenal. Dragged him into the wider galaxy. To the Accord of Souls, which humans could also never become members of.
But he was still a cop. A protector of the innocent. He would do that here, as long and as well as they allowed him.
Gareth wiped both hands down his face, watching the stranger in the mirror do the same. He ran his hands back though blond hair that should have been cut six weeks ago. At this point, he was likely to turn into a bohemian, a surfer pretty soon, with long, curly locks already touching his collar and perhaps down to his shoulder blades in another year.
A Field Agent would never be that far outside of regulations, unless he was a Secret Agent operating under cover. But Gareth wasn’t a Field Agent these days. Might never be again.
Would most likely never see Earth again. Or his friends. His family.
Or Pippa.
Gareth reached into a pocket of his pants and pulled out the tiny, leather pouch his still kept with him at all times. From inside, he pulled out the gold ring with the single, white diamond in the middle, surrounded by ruby and gold stones representing Sky Patrol.
Today, they represented Loss. The life he could never go back to. The sacrifices he had been called upon to make, in the name of duty.
He had considered asking Talyarkinash to find a way to clone his body and turn it back into the human he had been, so that they could return it to Earth and he could be declared formally dead. Pippa might wait the rest of her life for a man who could never return. And even if he did, she was still human, so they could never have children. Never be a family.
He tucked the ring and the pouch back into his pocket and sighed heavily.
Never be.
Gareth emerged from the small bathroom into his suite. It was as identical to his cabin, back at the Arsenal, as he had been able to make it, both in layout and content. A single bed, or whatever the equivalent was when he was seven-feet-four-inches tall and had a seventy-inch chest. The chester had been scaled up as well, but still had four drawers, white paint, and a flat top. A reading chair by the bathroom, warm and comfortable. A table and two chairs by the door.
Home. Or a reasonable imitation thereof.
He grabbed his tunic from where he had dropped it on the bed and pulled it on. Constabulary Blue, like his pants. Almost the color of his blue-gray eyes. So tight as to be a second skin, but somehow woven with a layer of triangular scales covering much of the exterior and providing protection against blunt and edged weapons.
The uniform of a Constable. Or whatever Gareth was. He hadn’t been to their police school, but had come back to his cabin after dinner every night and studied and read everything he was allowed access to. Back home, he had been a Field Agent of Sky Patrol, so he knew how to be a cop.
Here, he was introduced to anyone who visited this facility as an Explorer, roughly equivalent to a Patrolman, or a Deputy Agent back home. It was a good enough cover story. The fewer people that knew the truth, the safer everyone would be.
He had no idea what the actual truth was either.
Gareth turned and found the digital clock sitting on the chester, counting slowly. Getting used to a twenty-eight-hour day had been possibly the smallest thing, as well as the weirdest, in a month of complete nonsense.
Fourteen meant local zenith. Back home, time for lunch. Here, breakfast was at six, lunch was at eleven, dinner was at sixteen, and supper was at twenty-one. Four meals, instead of the three he grew up with, but Gareth just pretended that third meal was the equivalent of English High Tea and that all sort of made it all work in his head.
Dr. Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, and Pippa’s father, would have called it a serious case of culture shock, and he would have been correct. But there wasn’t anything Gareth could do but roll forward and figure it all out as he went.
That was all any of them could do, but their lives hadn’t been nearly as upended as his.
Gareth held his elbows out and flexed, making sure his tunic stretched right. According to Talyarkinash, it would move with him when he changed forms, becoming somehow absorbed into his flesh when he did, and adding an extra layer of dermal armor when…
How did you explain it to a complete stranger that had never seen it happen? That Gareth St. John Dankworth, as a human, did not have any of the limitations to his genetics that the Chaa, the Elders who had uplifted all of the species of the Accord of Souls and then bound them into a psionic unity, had put on all the others.
What vocabulary did you use to explain that you could turn into a thing he called a Star Dragon?
Gareth shrugged and headed towards the door of his cabin. He didn’t want to be late to his meeting. Constable Baker and Senior Constable Grodray would be there.
Gareth hoped that meant that there would be action soon.
Constable
Eveth Baker considered the view as the vehicle cruised through the late-morning sky of Irron. It wasn’t an auto-taxi, but a similar vehicle, privately owned by the Constabulary to transport officers around. The craft was low and sleek, done in the Constabulary’s traditional steel blue inside and out, with a comfortable cabin that would seat eight Vanir or a dozen Grace on the two benches running parallel to the sides. She and Grodray had the plush, warm seats to themselves.
According to her partner, Jackeith Grodray, the blue overhead was among the closest to the planet Earth where Dankworth had been born and lived his whole life. Hopefully, that had helped with his acclimation.
She didn’t like it, any of it, but they were going to need his help.
The sky was clear and a blue that just seemed artificial to her eyes, but she was used to more urban places like Orgoth Vortai or Hurquar. Irron was almost a nature preserve, by comparison, with few cities of any note and vast wilderness areas covering much of the planet still.
The Constabulary maintained one of their largest training facilities out here, away from civilian eyes that might not react well to loud noises and activities of the men and women training to protect the many worlds of the Accord of Souls.
Below, a plateau stretched out, overlooking a gorge that seemed bottomless in the fog and spray of a tremendous river waterfalling over one thousand meters into a lake so blue it might have been tanzanite.
“Kopek for your thoughts, Eve?” her partner asked, looking up from his digital book as the cruiser banked and started its descent to the base revealed below them in the trees.
“You’d get overcharged, Jack,” she said. “Still not sure what we’re doing here. What I’m doing here. What the hell happens next. You know?”
“You’re here because you impressed the hell out of my bosses and helped break open a major smuggling and genetics operation, Baker,” the man turned serious. “Lot of sunlight suddenly shining in on places where it never should have left. We’ll be years cleaning up all the corruption revealed. This might be one of the biggest cases in our lifetimes.”
Eveth shrugged. She was a cop. That was why she had joined in the first place. Stopping bad guys.
“And Dankworth?” she turned to face him. The ground was rushing up to meet them, but she had been here before, and this runway wasn’t all the impressive, once you had already flown next to the waterfall overlooking a kilometer drop.
“He’s here because he has nowhere else to go,” Grodray nodded once. Sharp. Fierce. Decisive. “He’s a cop, like us, trying to save the galaxy. And everybody is still trying to identify a way we can stop Maximus without him, but nobody’s come up with anything better.”
“He’s a monster, Grodray,” she snapped.
“We’re all monsters, Baker,” he replied in that cold, flat voice he got when he was past teasing. “Sane people do not take up arms and put on a badge. They become musicians. Or shopkeepers. Something predictable. That’s why Kathra divorced me and remarried. Too many nights alone when the kids were young. It’s why she found a second husband who’s a sales manager. Safe. Quiet. Comfortable. But someone has to do this job. Someone has to hold the line against all the people trying to cheat the system and make an unfair profit. Without the Accord, you have chaos.”
“Or Maximus,” she mused, mostly to herself, but apparently loud enough for him to hear.
“Or something worse, yes,” Grodray acknowledged. “I remember Maximus telling Gareth about his plan to become Emperor Marc the First, an immortal human who was planning to take over the entire Accord with the help of more humans, and rule forever.”
“So we have to trust another human to save us?” she sneered. It wasn’t meant to come out that bitter, but even she heard the tones in her voice.
So did Grodray. His eyes got hard.
“That man has sacrificed everything, Eve,” Jackeith’s voice dropped to a murmur. “Everything. And I’ve not heard any reports of him complaining about it afterwards. He’s lost his past, his present, and his future. All his friends and family. The woman he loved. And he would do it again tomorrow, if we asked. Keep that in mind.”
“I know, Grodray,” her own voice dropped as the cruiser landed lightly. “Will it be enough?”
“I don’t know, Eve,” he said. “But we’ve got to try.”
Crime Boss
It had been a month from hell. Marc had no other way to quantify it. Six weeks ago, he had been the functional ruler of the entire world of Zathus, living in the shadows yes, but with his tentacles into almost every aspect of that world’s economy and polity.
Granted, he had inherited most of that power from that idiot Warreth, the birdman Cinnra, but the gang Marc had taken control of, the small army of corrupt officials and merchants, did his bidding. Nobody did anything major without a nod or a word.
And then those two lizardmen had turned on him and ruined everything.
Even Marc had been shocked at how tenuous his organization had turned out to be, so maybe it had been for the best that it had all gone down the way it had. He had shut down the main facility on Zathus and sent everyone into hiding before going to Hurquar, bringing on twenty-five people with him.
Of those, ten had made it out of the trap that he had managed to spring on himself.
Even Marc wasn’t so arrogant as to suggest it was anybody’s fault but his own. He could have killed Gareth instead of taking him prisoner. But he had wanted information that the Nari woman had. And the two Yuudixtl. They had been the ones that had upgraded Marc in the first place, taking a lowly human and turning him into something even more dangerous.
Seven-foot-four. Three hundred and forty pounds of muscle. Genius-level intellect to go with it.
And he was still human, underneath. At least in all the ways that mattered. Everyone else belonged to the Accord of Souls. Psionically linked to one another in such a way that intramural violence was almost impossible.
Almost.
There were a few. There were always a few who slid into the cracks. Criminals born wrong, to hear the locals talk. As if that was a mental-health issue that could be fixed with a little genetic surgery. Just undo those miswired neurons and you’d be right as rain.
And boringly obedient.
Humans didn’t have those limits. Marc Sarzynski wore the physical form of a Vanir, but his soul was still human. Some of his old gang have lived in fear of that. Many of them had turned on him.
Like this stupid bastard.
Marc looked down on the Elohynn tied to the chair with cruelly-tight leather straps. They were in a warehouse, another in an immeasurable string of them, where Marc and his closest associates had hidden like rats when the Constabulary had suddenly known too much about too many things.
Like perhaps someone had started feeding them tidbits, not realizing that he was the only person who knew some of them, so things could be traced back to him.
The room was cold, but Marc was sweating with effort. He had stripped down to dungarees and a T-shirt with some band he had never heard of on the front.
The Elohynn was sweating, too.
They were alone in this office. Several of Marc’s people were outside, where they could watch though the big picture window if they wanted, but he doubted most of them had the stomach for it. Maiair and Yooyar probably, the Warreth sisters who were fast becoming his indispensable right and left hands. Zorge, the Nari physicist-turned-spymaster. They had been there when Gareth Dankworth had unleashed his ultimate abomination on the galaxy.
When he had transformed into a dragon.
Damabiath the Elohynn had obviously thought that he could get away with it. Too many raids had gotten too close. Maybe the Elohynn planned to make a little profit feeding the cops tips about Marc’s whereabouts for the reward money. Something. It had worked.
Right up until he forgot that he was dealing with a Vanir that had a 200 IQ and absolutely no qualms about doing violence to one of his fellow sentient creatures.
Marc missed his medical theater equipment. It had been perfect for slowly torturing his enemies into revealing the little tidbits that he had needed to take control of the gang, and the underworld, and eventually the cops and prosecutors on Zathus.
But he didn’t want anything from Damabiath.
Well, technically that wasn’t true. There was just nothing that the Elohynn could tell Marc that he didn’t already know. Or wanted to know.
No, they had a much more personal conclusion, and it was at hand.
The Elohynn was naked. Marc understood the importance of removing the clothes from a victim. The psychological effects of being completely unmasked.
This particular species tended to run taller than humans, perhaps six and a quarter to six and a half feet for the men. The slightest bit smaller for the women. Plus those gorgeous wings.
Mark Sarzynski was a head taller now.
The angelic criminal was seated, which just emphasized the size difference. The straps holding his arms and legs to the chair were too tight, cutting off circulation in ways that would start to be troublesome in another hour or so.
If it mattered.
His wings were stretched out as far as they would go sideways, and then held in place by spikes Marc had personally punched into the tips and attached to chains in the walls, far enough back that Damabiath couldn’t pull them loose by tearing skin. Not without breaking bones first.
The man’s mouth was gagged with a piece of leather that showed intense bite marks, but had resisted all attempts for the Elohynn to get through it. Maybe if he had a few more hours he could have managed.
Marc reached down and picked up a pair of pliers. They were already covered with blood and down at this point, so he wiped them slowly on a messy towel that had been clean a hour ago.
Marc examined his victim closer. All the feathers had been individually plucked from the left wing. From his studies, that was the single most debilitating fear any Elohynn could face. Many chose self-termination, rather than lose the ability to fly and be relegated to the “two-dimensional crowd,” as they tended to view the rest of the Accord.
Marc watched the eyes follow the pliers, rather than the wielder. There didn’t appear to be any mind left inside there at this point. Marc hadn’t asked a single question once he got the man trussed up like a turkey for the plucking.
Just pain. Artfully applied, as if a psychotic Grace had needed to create a new sculpture installation.
Idly, Marc wondered if he might locate a Grace who viewed such torture as art. With their sensory tentacles, they might be perfect for this sort of thing if he could break their operant conditioning hard enough. Elohynn, conversely, were among the most empathic species in the Accord, so they could never really abide with pain, unless they were so crazy as to be dangerous. It made them good counsellors, and reasonable bankers, but lousy criminals.
Slowly, Marc replaced the pliers on the bench and picked up a knife. Damabiath had betrayed him. Sold him to the Constabulary for thirty pieces of silver and the hopes for a pardon. Expected that he would never be identified. Wouldn’t have, but for an inside leak, a data clerk with a gambling problem, trying to reduce her debt with information for Maximus.
“And now, we have reached the final stage of our conversation,” Marc said in a low tone.
Damabiath tried to say something through the gag. Tried to scream, perhaps, with what little was left of his mind and his soul.
“You, of all people, should have known how I deal with traitors, Damabiath,” Marc scolded the man. “You were there. You watched the punishment. Helped even, by providing me the proof I needed to unearth one of the conspiracies against me. My, how the mighty have fallen.”
Marc considered the being. His eyes were all whites at this point, painting a masterpiece in red blood and sweating skin.
“I do not feel good about this,” Marc admitted quietly. “Any of it. But you people have forgotten that I’m not one of you. Am not bound by your ridiculous morality. And even then, I probably wouldn’t have been reduced to something so petty as this, but someone had to become an example. The children of the night need to fear me more than they do the Constabulary. In that, your life will provide one, last, valuable lesson.”
Marc stepped forward and slammed the blade into the Elohynn’s chest with all his augmented might, driving it straight through the fragile keel bone and cutting his heart in two. There was precious little blood, and the light went out of the man’s eyes quickly.
Marc pulled the knife from the cooling corpse, cleaned it, and set it with the other tools, taking the time to methodically pack things away. Hopefully, this would send the correct message and he would never have to do this again.
How in the nine hells had Marc Sarzynski, Deputy Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, fallen so far? He considered all the tiny steps that brought him thus. None of them included a concrete commitment to evil.
And yet, here he was.
This road wasn’t even paved with good intentions. No. Easy clips. Corners cut. Mistakes when he tried to finally come out ahead of Gareth St. John Dankworth once and for all, only to fall ever so short, time and again.
And worse, he knew in his soul Dankworth hadn’t been competing. Or rather, not with Marc. Gareth had been competing with himself to become the best agent he could imagine.
Marc’s jealousy at second place was just a terrible taskmaster.
The door opened and closed, noisily enough as to be obvious. Marc glanced up. Maiair, her red crest at half-mast. Powerful, but not threatening. Supportive.
He would make her a queen, once he had regained his power. Not an Empress, but close. He would need her and her sister, and there was no better way to bind them to his throne.
“The body?” she asked simply, standing more or less at attention, but turned in such a way that she didn’t have to see or acknowledge the mess. Yooyar and Zorge waited outside the office, still visible through glass, but separated by the closed door.
Middle managers, as it were.
Marc considered his options. Terror was an effective tool, but it must be used like the edge of a razor, slicing a little at a time and withdrawing. Overuse would render it comically less effective. People could become inured to such atrocities if they became commonplace.
Once should hold everyone in fear for a year or more.
“Leave him,” Marc said in a heavy voice.
It was acceptable for Maiair to know that he took no pleasure in this task. No pride in a well-tortured opponent. That he still had his humanity, underneath it all.
“After we have made it to safety, contact a journalist,” he decided. “Give them the address and leave the door unlocked. Damabiath on the evening news will send the message to anyone wavering at this point.”
“Won’t the Constables know it was us?” she pressed.
“They already know we’re on this planet,” Marc said. “I need the local underworld to hide me. They must fear me more than they do that damnable dragon.”
“Understood,” she said as she turned. She hesitated.
“What?” Marc snapped, as he faced her.
“Are you all right?” she asked in a quiet voice. Nervous about overstepping an undrawn boundary.
“If I never have to do that again, it will still be too soon,” he replied. “But this has become a war. And bad things are likely to happen.”
Scientist
“Are you sure this is the sort of place you wish to go, father?” Pippa asked Royston as they approached the front door of the concert hall, surrounded by youngsters, teenagers frequently flirting with hooliganism but still safely on this side of the line.
Royston nodded, watching the scene with his pursed lips set in a firm, disapproving line.
There was no choice. Science had demanded that he try alternate methods to find the answer to the puzzle he sought. They were in a neighborhood he wouldn’t have come on his own, down by the wharves of East London, but all his logical deduction had led him to this conclusion.
“Two, please,” Pippa said to young woman inside the little kiosk at the front of the theater, sliding several shilling coins across the counter.
The young woman pushed a button and several strips of rigid, white paper emerged from the machine underneath with a mechanical clunk. The woman pulled them clear and handed them to Pippa, leaning forward just a little so she could observe Royston, standing next to his daughter.
“Rock on, grandpa!” she called with a smile that did nothing to assuage the doubts plaguing Royston as to the rightness of this task.
Still, everything else had failed.
Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, had discovered enough new aspects of mathematics and physics in the last month to probably be considered for a Nobel Prize one of these days, and possibly the Fields Medal, but he had still failed in his intended task.
Gareth St. John Dankworth had disappeared from his cabin aboard Shadow Base One, the Arsenal, and nobody could explain how. Royston had even considered it to be perhaps a practical joke, but there was something there when he looked. Radiation signatures he could not explain with any science, in places that lent credence to the story and defied him in all other things.
Pippa, dearest only-daughter who reminded him too much of departed Elizabeth, had suggested baldly that obviously his understanding of physic was simply insufficient. Royston Loughty, possibly the greatest expert on Stellar Radiation in the entire Solar System, was out of his depth.
He had laughed then.
And yet.
Nights spent with a pad of paper, his favorite pipe, and a forgotten martini had gotten him nowhere. His favorite syncopated jazz music, from the bizarrely-experimental down to the coolest hep-cats, had left him cold. Rachmaninoff and Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, even Gilbert and Sullivan. Nothing had provided him the inspiration he needed.
Royston escorted Pippa into the noisy auditorium on his left arm, as was proper. He felt desperately out of place here, wearing his traditional tweeds and a broad, silk tie that had been a gift from Pippa for some father’s day long forgotten. Even his porkpie hat made him stand out in a room full of youngsters that probably considered Pippa an old maid at twenty-seven, with their slicked-back hair greased into pompadours made to look like little duck tails.
The mass of humanity around him probably had a median age of twenty, and he suspected an analysis of the mean would be even lower if he wishes to apply scientific procedures.
He did not.
Pippa was a bright spot of color, in her uniform as a Women’s Auxiliary of Earth Force Sky Patrol. Crimson skirt just past her knees. Matching tunic as long as a blazer, double-breasted over the left with gold buttons and gold embroidery lacing. A yellow stripe edged the tunic and the collar, making her look like a professional woman, emphasizing the red hair and bright green eyes of her Scots heritage.
The children around them on all sides seemed to be in their own uniform. For the boys, blue dungarees, rolled up twice at the ankle. White T-shirts tucked in, frequently with a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve. Often a black jacket, sometimes leather and sometimes cotton denim.
The girls were identifiable by socio-economic class as Royston watched. Long poodle skirts gave way to simple skirts of a cut similar to Pippa’s, growing progressively shorter until they barely covered more than a beach costume, as one tended down the scale of their father’s income and profession. Finally, at what he considered the bottom, some daring souls were so androgynous as to ape the clothing of their male peers, even going so far as wearing pants in public.
Thankfully, Pippa’s rebellious stage had never progressed farther than experiments in hair colors. Even his reputation might not have protected her, to be seen in dungarees, somewhere other than a farm.
They made their way to wooden, fold-down seats closer to the rear than the front of the auditorium. Three teenage-looking girls in too much makeup politely slid sideways a seat to make space for he and Pippa to sit together.
The youngster Royston found on his left looked up at him and then touched him silently on the arm with a smile, her palm placed flat in a welcoming gesture that left him perhaps both more and less terrified at the same time. Pippa’s grin when he looked at her did nothing to assuage his embarrassment.
After a few moments, the lights came down and the restive crowd began to settle. Red velvet curtains across the stage withdrew slowly to the sides, revealing a band already in place, dressed in matching, slender black suits, with narrow ties and slicked back hair like so many of the men down front.
At the front, a young woman stood alone at a mic stand, eyeing the crowd like a predator stalking the high grass. She wore a turquoise, skin-tight dress, cut high on the sides to reveal too much thigh, like a nightclub’s torch singer. Her long, brunette hair was wild and loose, billowing lightly in the breeze of a fan down front and centered up on her.
Black opera gloves covered her to elbows, and the dress itself was only to mid-thigh. At least she had sensible pumps on her feet, rather than the black, lace-up boots that she seemed to project with this image.
Royston tore his eyes aware from the mesmerizing female as the drummer began, a hard backbeat so at odds with the light brush of good jazz.
It was primal. Powerful. Unyielding.
After sixteen full measures, the crowd had fallen to utter silence, perhaps snakes charmed by the man with the pungi as they emerged from the darkness of the basket into the sun of this woman’s music.
The bass player joined now, a harmonic beat walking back and forth on chords. His instrument was played upright in the classical style, but is was barely wider than the fretboard, with a plug emerging from the bottom to connect to the immense, black speaker stacks Royston saw threatening the crowd from both sides of the stage.
Two electric guitarists framed the woman, once closer to the front and one a step back, nearer in depth to the bass player. If he understood the mechanics and politics of the modern music, they represented a lead and rhythm guitar to offset the rhythm section of drums and bass. He did not see any horn players, so this would not be jazz as Royston understood the concept, but rock and roll.
He would survive the experience, come hell or high water.
A spotlight suddenly illuminated an upright piano off to one side, it’s battered, wooden shell perhaps older than the young man playing it, as he slid a hand down from the top of the scale to draw all mesmerized eyes to the keys.
He began to play. No, that did not do the act justice.
The young man attacked the keyboard as though mortal combat had begun.
Hard, rhythmic, almost bombastic, if one could use that term to describe someone with the apparent technical chops to challenge Rachmaninoff instead throwing himself into rock and roll. Royston found his foot tapping with that back beat, head bobbing ever-so-slightly to the immense, lyrical complexities of the pianist.
One guitarist joined him. A full measure later, the other man gave meaning to the term Lead Guitar with a power and emotion that Royston had only known the best violinists and saxophonists to achieve. It was like a squall line had emerged from the stage and washed over the entire audience, a tide pushing them a little closer to shore, before the rip currents began to suck them out to sea.
And then the woman opened her mouth and sang.
Jazz was not generally known for its singers. The art form was in the instruments and the technical sophistication of the players. The few good scat singers had to work more to keep a hard beat with the musicians behind them, but rarely dominated, instead providing another piece of the rhythm section. Torch singers, on the other hand, were slow and emotionally-laden, immersing the hearer in sadness and longing.
This woman was power. Raw and unrestrained. Anger and love, sophistication and destruction.
It was like the ancient Hindu goddess Kali-ma stood before him on the stage, proclaiming the end of the world.
Somewhere in the middle of the performance, Royston noted that the singer had an easy working range of three octaves, and had touched four across the breadth of her songs.
At no point had a Master of Ceremonies emerged to work the crowd, and the woman never spoke. One song ended, everyone stopped to take a quick breath, drink some water while the crowd roared and clapped, and tune instruments.
And then the next song began, without even an explanation from the girl. Just the next notes in her ritual magic.
Royston felt one upbeat song end and the enchantress on stage transitioned into a love song that would have made the most embittered torch singer weep. He was suddenly nineteen again and meeting Elizabeth at that dance. In the middle of the first chorus, he realized that he had a young woman on each side leaning against him and weeping. Pippa and the unknown teenager had both unknowingly mirrored themselves, hooking an arm around his and pressing their heads against his shoulder while they listened.
As a sociological experiment, it was astonishing, but Royston did not move. Could not move. Both young women apparently needed something like this, and his mind was still too focused on the music, the syncopation, the skills on display. The raw emotions that the woman could invoke.
At the end of the song, Royston looked down at the young stranger on his left. She gazed up at him, blinked, and blushed so hard he thought she might pass out. He grinned a secret grin to her as she untangled herself and leaned away, lips pressed together to keep from speaking.
Pippa just grinned at his discomfort.
The woman on stage stood still in the quiet, and looked out over the audience. Her eyes seemed to find Royston in the stygian depths of the auditorium, boring into his soul with her medusa’s gaze. Royston fell into darkness with the rest of the auditorium as the stage went dark, but for a single spotlight on the girl.
“One more,” she intoned in a throating alto. “Best for last.”
And it was. The previous hour had been a tour-de-force of emotional manipulation unlike anything Royston had ever witnessed, in any jazz bar or orchestra. The last song was Joshua at Jericho, bringing the very walls down with his music and the power of his faith.
Silence fell as the piano finally walked the last bits of tune away into the darkness. The spotlight went out and there was only darkness. Only emptiness.
Royston felt beads of sweat wick into his undershirt as his emotions tried to return to anything approximating normal. It would be hours before something so mundane was possible.
The lights came up suddenly and revealed the red, velvet curtains closed, sealing off the sorceress from her worshippers. The crowd of teenagers came alive and quickly made their way out of the auditorium, voices only slowly rising back to normal.
His was not the only soul in shock.
Even the teenager girl on his left stopped and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek before turning and fleeing silently with her cohorts.
Within minutes, Royston found himself alone in the space, with only Pippa as company. She was withdrawn and quiet, but that was an understanding on her part that his brain was seeking some higher answers.
Finally, he rose, handing her to her feet.
Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, felt thirty, perhaps forty years younger. Energized in ways he could not remember.
He smiled at Philippa as he made his way to aisle.
Syncopated Jazz was a controlled thing. Technically sophisticated but somewhat emotionless. Symphonic music had more of the emotion, but it was filtered through a hundred musicians before it reached the audience.
This had been powerful. Primal. All the amazing skill of the best jazz musicians, but raw and uninhibited.
He nodded at Pippa and took her arm, emerging into the warm night at the tail end of the crowd.
“Did you find it?” she asked hesitantly. “Whatever it was that drew you here?”
“Perhaps,” he replied quietly, drawing a breath of the magic deep into his lungs to take home with him to orbit.
Mathematics and physics were like jazz. Sophisticated and technical, without the powerful emotions that rock and roll brought to the table. They had not led him astray so much as merely fallen short of that place where his mind, his soul, needed to go.
He had needed rock and roll to show him the path.
Yes, perhaps he indeed had found the way.
Hunters
“He did what?” Omerlon demanded angrily.
Rage drove the Elohynn to his feet, which was an impressive task, considering how far overweight Omerlon had grown, over the years. On bad days, his wings could barely lift him into the sky, and he didn’t have the endurance to fly for long.
But no Elohynn ever walked.
That was why he had dedicated vehicles, customized to carry him around. That, and it was far easier to hide inside a closed vehicle than be out in the open where any goomba thug might take a shot at him. Or narc him to the cops.
This vehicle had been converted from a panel van, giving him three meter ceilings and a thick, brown shag rug. He used it to pace right now. They still had time before arrival at the next destination.
The Warreth stayed seated across the way cringed, but didn’t clam up.
“Reporters got a tip, boss,” Danzeekar replied. “Damabiath had been tied to a chair and his left wing had been stripped to the flesh. Not a single feather left. And he was dead.”
Omerlon hissed in rage. There was no greater insult anyone could give to an Elohynn. None. Anywhere. Bodies would pile up at the morgue over something like this. His Warreth captain agreed, from the set of his headcrest and the way his feathers all puffed out a little.
“And Maximus did it?” Omerlon snarled. “We have confirmation?”
“I got someone close to his inner circle, feeding us tidbits now and again,” Danzeekar replied. “Never much, but never wrong in the past. They know which way the wind is blowing, but can’t get out right now. Maximus is a wild card and nobody’s sure what he’ll do next.”
“If he wants a war, I’ll give him one,” Omerlon growled.
All his life, he had been an outsider kid. Too heavy compared to those sleek bastards at the aerie who made fun of him. Too short. Too ugly.
Always too something.
He didn’t know if he had been born broken and didn’t find out until later, or if the anger had just built up over enough years and twisted something inside him. Most people couldn’t kill someone without a lot of anguish up front, as well as afterwards.
Omerlon had gotten over that crap pretty quick. It had gotten him in with a series of ever-more-dangerous criminal gangs, until he ended up in charge of the biggest on Orgoth Vortai. An Elohynn ruling an underworld largely composed of Grace, but still the dregs of any society.
Omerlon stopped pacing and turned to face Danzeekar. They would be close to their destination and landing soon. He needed time to get himself together and look the part of the lord of the underworld, especially if he had to go to war with Maximus.
“Do we know where the bastard’s hiding?” Omerlon asked quietly, his voice honed down to a razor’s rusty edge.
“Negative on that, boss,” Danzeekar said. “I get my notes third-hand through delivery boys right now. Hasn’t been worth trying to push back up the chain yet, because we’re likely to blow our mole and it hasn’t been that important yet.”
“And it still isn’t,” Omerlon decided.
He flexed his head back and snapped a shudder through his wings to loosen them up. Had there been space in here, he would have run them out to points. He would probably need that level of intimidation shortly, especially with some of the people around here having second thoughts.
“Find me those two physicists that disappeared,” Omerlon ordered. “We’ll use them as bait to bring Maximus to us, and then crush that weasel.”
“You got it, boss,” Danzeekar nodded.
Outside, Omerlon felt the truck shift as it started its descent. The Mayor of Londra, the biggest city, needed to be reminded how little wiggle room he had if he wanted to stay out of jail, and keep his entire, corrupt family free with him.
Omerlon looked forward to venting some of his spleen on the bastard. Maximus wasn’t going to get away with killing his people.
Fugitive
“Heard any news?” Morty asked as he emerged from his bedroom.
Xiomber looked up from his morning paper, tea mug in one hand and a sour scowl on his face as he sat in the dining space and enjoyed his quiet.
“News news, or real stuff?” Xiomber asked.
Morty walked over to join his egg-brother at the table. The place was cheap, but their needs weren’t all that great right now. And a month on the run had given Morty a far-greater appreciation of the simple things in life, like hot food that didn’t come out of a convenience store refrigerator. And a roof over his head when it was raining.
The table even a had a pretty good view of the city from about seventy stories up. Churquark was the name of both the city and the planet. It was mainly a Grace world, so there was art everywhere, but the window next to the kitchen table looked out over a two hundred meter tall bronze statue of a Chaa, one of the Elders, poised apparently at that moment of awakening that had transformed them from amazingly-advanced scientists into gods.
And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing Morty could see from here, as he pulled up a seat and poured himself some tea.
“Whatever news you got, Xiomber,” Morty replied to his partner. “You always wake up at dawn and scour the boards and papers for things. I need my beauty sleep.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Xiomber nodded.
Morty just grinned and let his egg-brother’s sarcasm roll off his scales. He was feeling especially feisty this morning.
“So talk to me,” Morty prompted.
“We been here three days, Morty,” Xiomber sighed.
“And we’ve been on the run for five weeks,” Morty countered. “Maximus ain’t taken over the galaxy in that time, and nobody’s heard anything about Gareth or Talyarkinash, so either they got away, or the Constables really did catch them and have been hiding them someplace.”
“We better hope that the Constables didn’t catch them then,” Xiomber paused and sipped his tea noisily, like an alligator running low in the water, eyes and snout above the steam. “Prices for gear had gone through the roof on the black market.”
“Everything?” Morty felt a metaphorical scorpion perch on his shoulder and eye the side of his head hungrily. Never a good way to wake up.
“Everything we would need to build a new lab,” Xiomber explained. “Generators, control surfaces, secondary coils, even the sensors like we used to locate Sarzynski and Dankworth in the first place.”
“They know the truth, then,” Morty was sure.
“That’s my guess, too,” his partner nodded. “Somebody rolled, or maybe they finally raided the palace back on Zathus. Rumor on the street was that Maximus shut the place down when you and I bailed, and nobody cleaned it up afterwards. Wouldn’t take much to put two and two together, ya know?”
“No way to build a new lab?” Morty asked, just in case.
“Not an underground one,” Xiomber said. “And I’m guessing all the legitimate physicists in the family are probably cursing our names right now for the amount of paperwork they suddenly have to go through to replace or upgrade anything.”
Morty shrugged. Small price to pay, if they wanted to ensure that the Accord of Souls was still here in a year.
Ya burn the house down, you don’t get to complain about sleeping in the backyard when it rains. Summoning a human like Maximus had to be the dumbest idea he’d ever let himself be talked into. Summoning Gareth to stop him had perhaps balanced the scales a little. Hopefully enough.
If the Chaa really were gods, he was going to have to do a lot of hand-waving, when he got to his final reward. Angry deities weren’t going to be happy at what he had done to the galactic commons they had carefully built and arranged before leaving. And they sure weren’t going to like humans running around outside their house.
“Any good news from all that?” Morty continued after a moment of thought.
“We’re connected into the underground here,” Xiomber said in a careful voice.
“But?”
“But both the Constables and Maximus are hunting our asses, Morty,” his egg-brother said. “And offering threats and rewards that are going to get somebody to roll on us, eventually.”
“You’re the street etiquette expert,” Morty replied. “Is there anybody who could protect us? I’m willing to work for my keep, as long as they don’t go down Cinnra’s path and decide they need more humans. Even cops. At some point, someone will talk.”
“Or a human will walk into a teashop and get tasted by a Grace?” Xiomber sneered.
“Hey, you left him alone, too,” Morty said. “If she knows what he tastes like, my greatest hope is that the cops scared the wits out of the girl. You saw what that Vanir chick was like when she took off after Gareth.”
“Yeah,” Xiomber shuddered, eyes flickering with memory. “Ain’t going there again.”
“So find us someplace to set up shop,” Morty said. “Even half-legit works for me. I haven’t completely forgotten how to write code for responsible companies. I really don’t want to have to go back to Yuudix and hide among a billion grains of sand. Don’t think that would stop the Constabulary.”
Xiomber nodded in agreement. He started to say something when his pocketcomm beeped.
The two Yuudixtl looked at each other for a moment, and then Xiomber shrugged and answered it.
“They’re your kopeks,” he said into the phone and then listened.
“Yeah?” Xiomber said a moment later. “Okay. Thanks. I owe you one for that. Later.”
He hung up and stared at Morty
“We got a problem.”
Officer of the Court
Gareth walked into the briefing room expecting to find a mob waiting. Instead, he found an empty conference room with Talyarkinash Liamssen quietly waiting, sipping from what smelled like a glass of juice from here. Gareth blushed slightly as he realized that no human, nor Vanir, should be able to smell that well. Even a Nari like her might be hard pressed to match it.
And yet.
She rose as he entered and stepped away from the big, rectangular table to hug him. Nothing more, just physical contact that she seemed to find reassuring. If Gareth had given up everything in order to stop Maximus, Talyarkinash had come close in terms of cost.
She had lost her entire existence, being arrested at the same time Gareth was and quickly disappeared into police custody. However, she had been a willing witness once everything was explained to her, turning over names and addresses to the two Constables. It was the least she could do to help undo all the evil she had done, unwittingly or not.
She had burned all bridges, but still had a future in front of her. She was still Nari. Still five-foot-eight, approaching six feet at the tips of her ears. Her Imperial Blue fur was still sleek and shiny with gorgeous stripes, complimenting her eyes. Gareth had even gotten used to a woman with bigger and more luxurious muttonchop sideburns than any man he had ever known could grow.
He would have guessed that the Chaa, the Elder race responsible for the Accord of Souls, had taken a Canadian Lynx and transformed it into a woman-like creature. The eyes slitted vertically. The snout was ever-so-slightly prominent. She smiled with teeth that had more points than his did when she smiled at him.
But she had become a friend. And he, hers. She would have gone to prison forever, according to the Constables, but for her willingness to work with them to understand everything she had done to Gareth. And what some greater fool might do, next time.
Someone like Marc Sarzynski.
Gareth took his seat and considered coffee. Or whatever the thing in the silver urn on the side table should actually be called. It was close enough for his taste buds, raised on the instant stuff kept in a big can in the freezer, rather than freshly-roasted beans ground on demand.
Sounded like too much work. Like shaving had turned into as his beard came in. Or getting his hair cut.
Gareth wondered if he was going through teenage rebellion, or a very early mid-life crisis. Being turned into a giant alien creature would probably have that effect on a guy.
The side door opened before Gareth could decide. Eveth Baker and Jackeith Grodray entered, and nobody else. Just the four of them in the room.
He looked around the room at the other three people with an inside giggle. He and the two Constables were all wearing the exact same uniform, the steel blue bodysuit with triangular scales. Grodray had added the outer tunic that made him look more formal, while he and Baker had not.
Talyarkinash was wearing purple. Skin-tight, cheongsam top without any sleeves. Baggy, Samurai pants in a broad straight-leg cut, with a high waist that flared out at the top, almost like a pirate girdle. Everything she wore was embroidered with silver, in some arcane design that almost looked like something he had seen once in a Shia Mosque in Samarkand.
“What’s so funny?” Baker asked as she took the seat directly across from Gareth.
She wasn’t angry. Or it wasn’t at him, anyway. At last not that he could tell.
Grodray had ended up across from the Nari woman, but his face was more closed.
“Wondering if there was any symbolism in fashion,” Gareth replied.
It didn’t make any sense, but she had asked.
Baker looked like she wanted to say something, then looked like she was trying not to roll her eyes at him. Finally, she huffed once and settled.
“Will it be just us today?” Talyarkinash asked in a serious voice, dividing her attention between the two.
Eveth Baker was probably the more dangerous, from a purely physical standpoint, although Gareth had been her match back when he’s still been human. Grodray was still a more interesting foe from a strategic standpoint. He only looked like a Senior Constable, a role he played to mislead watchers. The man was really a Prime Investigator, a free agent allowed by his superiors to go wherever the crime might lead him.
As far as Gareth knew, Baker wasn’t one. Not yet, but she had something like a candidate status, so she probably would be in another year or so, if all went well.
Gareth really didn’t know where he fit into the whole mess. Talyarkinash was at least a scientist, and had been working closely with some of the staff here, but only a few people and most of them were not read fully into the project that was Gareth St. John Dankworth, renegade human, genetically-engineered monster.
Baker paused and looked deliberately at Grodray.
The older man suddenly looked angry enough to chew nails, where he had just been serious before.
“The fewer people that are aware of this operation, the better,” Grodray said ominously.
Gareth heard the echoes of vast, bureaucratic arguments in the background of those words. Complaints taken all the way to the highest authority, rather than being worked out down in the trenches.
When you have a human on the loose, things could get ugly. Two of them doubled the problems.
“How can we help?” Gareth asked the man simply.
That was why they were here. Nothing else would require the two of them to physically travel this far, when they could send a message or a courier.
“I understand from Dr. Liamssen that you have gained better control of your…powers,” Grodray began.
Gareth nodded silently.
“I need to see you in action, Gareth,” the Senior Constable said. “That will tell me what I need to know about how to use you, going forward.”
“Here?” he asked.
“No,” Grodray said. “Too many witnesses. We need to go up-country to the gunnery range. I’ve had it locked down for the next two days, so there will be nobody but us.”
Gareth whistled unconsciously at the astounding display of authority in those words. He caught the slightest flinch in Baker as well. Talyarkinash had never been in part of a major bureaucracy, so didn’t understand that it was almost never possible to simply snap your fingers and just have something happen.
“I can go whenever,” he said, turning to the Nari woman next to him. “Talyarkinash?”
“I suspected that was why you were here,” she allowed. “I have some equipment in my lab that we will need, specially prepared for Gareth when he’s in the field.”
“What kind of equipment?” Baker spoke up now.
“When he transforms, his clothing and anything he is carrying somehow become absorbed into the new form, and then returned to normal later,” Talyarkinash replied. “After a month, I still don’t understand it, but humans have vast, latent psionic powers that might eventually put them on a par with the Chaa.”
“And?” Baker almost growled.
“So the first round of bio-sensors I put on him went perfectly blank for the entire time he was transformed. Constable Baker,” the Nari woman returned the challenge. “I have a new design that I want to try. Hopefully it will work. Science is about attempting and failing until you succeed. I do not know if I am there, yet, but I am getting closer.”
“Oh.” Baker backed off, which Gareth found rather interesting.
She was a big woman. Slender and athletic, but muscular and a whole head taller than the scientist. However, she was apparently willing to learn, and maybe even admit when she was wrong, or maybe pushing a little too hard.
“Gareth?” Baker asked.
Which was kind of astounding, but he hoped he hid it well. Usually, she only called him Dankworth to his face.
“Whatever you need, Constable,” Gareth replied evenly. “Maximus is still out there.”
Scientist
If the gods would have allowed it, Talyarkinash would have rebuilt herself to be seven feet tall, just so she could lurk above Eveth Baker for once, to give the woman a dose of her own medicine. Among her own kind, Talyarkinash was usually an inch taller than any Nari woman she met.
Being around Vanir all the time was wearing on the soul.
She kept her grumbles to herself though, as she climbed into the Constabulary Transport and buckled herself in, followed by the three giants from some fairy tale. Her small equipment bag, almost a purse, went between her feet.
Gareth was the most perfect gentleman. Had been from the first moment they had met. Had remained so even after she had discovered he was human. He gave lie to all those horrible threats and fairy tales her mother had told her as a kitten, even going so far as to confirm her seatbelt was done before attaching his own harness when he got in just now.
Baker, on the other hand, had been a major burr in her tailfur from the beginning.
Talyarkinash was willing to allow that she had been with the bad guys at the time. And guilty of some of the worst crimes on the books. Technically. Conspiracy and Being an Accessory to Treason were not particularly good things to list on her C.V., so she was planning on leaving those off, if she ever managed to make to a class reunion.
At least one outside prison. She had a pretty good idea how many of her old associates would probably be able to make one of those in another few years.
Eveth Baker was a bully. Emotionally. Psychologically. Even physically. It made her a good cop, Talyarkinash supposed. It also made her a pain in the ass, most of the time.
At least Baker appeared to be completely immune to the charms of one Gareth St. John Dankworth. That helped.
Gareth still had the card from some other Nari woman in his wallet. Seriously, the woman had given a complete stranger from another species a scent card.
What the hell?
Not that Talyarkinash hadn’t considered doing the same, from time to time. Being human, Gareth had just possessed a magnetism that would have made her rich, had she been able to identify it, bottle it, and market it. After becoming Vanir, it was all she could do some days to not run her fingertips through his mane.
The craft lifting off concealed the way her fingers curled in her lap.
Post-zenith sun in a clear sky out the windows. Cool up here from the elevation, but she could have found a place out of the breeze, if she wanted to just bask on a warm rock. Instead, she had added a jacket that hung to her knees and a wool-lined cap with the perfect ear holes, for when they got even further up the enormous valley and the temperatures began to nip, even in direct sunlight.
This much wilderness was unnatural to a city kitten like her, but it was the hand she had been dealt. Rumors had been circulating that Maximus was currently in a war with his own people, deep in the underworld, to retain control. Or regain it. She was much safer with Baker and Grodray protecting her.
And Gareth.
If she was in the city, any city, someone would have found her, eventually. Maximus had done some amazingly savage things, even for a human, according to Gareth. She would have been on Sarzynski’s list. Especially from where the two of them had started, her and Maximus.
Much better here.
The flight took all of about fifteen long, silent minutes. Gareth was lost in his sightseeing. Baker was scowling at something, but she always did. Grodray had grown introspective.
Gareth had explained to her the armies of earlier centuries on Earth. The tremendous wars fought over things she still couldn’t quite parse. But more importantly, the science of destruction that his species had worshipped for so many millennia and the amazing advances they had driven in human culture, over just a few millennia.
Bronze Age to Space in three thousand years? Without outside intervention? Amazing.
And frightening. Where would they be in another thousand years?
The Gunnery Range they were about to take over was designed to give Heavy Rescue teams from the Constabulary a place to practice, working with weapons that could kill, rather than just stun, when you needed to blow things up, or destroy vehicles.
When you were reduced to the sorts of savagery that humans apparently just took for granted.
Talyarkinash shuddered, in spite of herself as they landed.
She had been here twice before, working with Gareth as he flew and practiced things like the breath weapon he had insisted almost all human cultures expected that dragons were born with.
Was there a more violent species, anywhere in the galaxy?
Today, the place was abandoned. Completely empty.
Even the vehicle bringing them had been auto-piloted, so the four of them might be the only people within twenty kilometers in any direction.
The old Talyarkinash would have had serious qualms about that sort of situation. Too easy to be brought up here and vanish without any trace that a crime had been committed. But Baker and Grodray weren’t that sort of cops. And there was Gareth.
This might be one of the few situations in her life that Talyarkinash was confident she could take at face value.
She turned in place to view the magnificent arena formed by a bowl of mountains all the way around her as she emerged. The tarmac where they had parked was probably over one thousand hectares by itself, with a line of six enormous hangars on the right and a set of office buildings and warehouses on the left. Space for five, or maybe eight thousand people in a pinch, although last time she had been here, the population had been barely two dozen, sworn to secrecy but still gawking in the afternoon sun at a bronze dragon flying overhead. At least they had all had an occasional friendly smile for her.
The air was crisp, but not enough to penetrate her coat. If a breeze picked up, the hat would go on, but she was fine for now. It even smelled faintly of pine sap, a sticky, green pungency at the lower end of her range. Gareth almost certainly could detect it, but she doubted the cops would be able to.
That brought the faintest smile to her face as she fell in behind Grodray, with the other two behind her.
He led the column to a tower, a five story square cylinder where flight control would be able to see aircraft coming and going, and keep them organized in the sort of emergency where auto-pilots might not be smart enough to all maneuver in synch.
The stairs warmed her, as did being inside, to the point she pulled her coat open and considered taking it off.
Talyarkinash found the echoes in the stairwell amusing. Grodray walked with a lighter step than most Vanir, while Baker seemed to be trying to punish each tread as she stepped on it. Gareth made almost no sound, just a whisper more than she did.
The step into the brightness of the top chamber, after the dimness of the stairwell, caused her eyes to slam nearly shut for a moment, before they flickered sideways again.
Empty.
Four sides where up to eight controllers could work, although one was normal. She followed Grodray to the side where they had the best view of the long runway. He turned and gave them his best grouchy stare.
“Wanted to confirm we were completely alone,” he said simply. “Dr. Liamssen, you said you had mechanisms that would not necessarily be part of Gareth’s translation?”
“I do,” she said, reaching into the bag she had brought with her and pulling out a small, clamshelled container that she handed to Gareth. “Attach this to your ear like an earring, and flip the tip into your ear canal.”
He took it and opened the box warily. Simple enough, for now. A clip for the cartilage, hinged. He pulled it out and put it on. She saw a little red light appear.
Talyarkinash pulled out the communicator and pressed the button that would send a beep. He nodded in response, so she handed it to Grodray.
“Gareth’s side is voice activated,” she said. “Press the button on the side when you want to talk.”
“Gareth, I’ve seen the videos of you in action,” Grodray said. “I’ve read Dr. Liamssen’s reports, plus a few others from around you. Those were relaxed, controlled circumstances. I want to see you in something like combat circumstances. Questions?”
“Anything in particular?” Gareth asked, himself falling into the seriousness of the other cops.
“Speed, maneuverability, fire,” Grodray said. “We’re reaching a point where talk now is about putting you in the field to hunt Sarzynski.”
“Stalking horse?” Gareth asked.
“Do you know a better way to hunt lions?”
Talyarkinash shuddered. Maximus was at least that dangerous. Hopefully Gareth was as well.
Draco-form
Gareth emerged from the bottom of the tower and sniffed the air around him. Nobody. It was odd, being able to smell like a hunting dog when he concentrated.
The base had been occupied until recently, but everyone had left at least a day ago. All this, just for him.
“Checking in,” he said, assuming that the earpiece would pick it up.
“Go ahead, Gareth,” Grodray said.
Deep breath. Reach down and grasp hold of the power that Talyarkinash had placed inside his soul when she given him the ability to transform. It no longer hurt as much to turn. Instead, it was a friendly heat that wrapped around him like hands, rather than scorching them. Even the pain of transformation was manageable.
Gareth paused, and took a second breath. The fire seemed to engulf him physically, although he had seen videos where he transformed, and everything was internal.
Just his imagination that he was burning.
And his perception changed as well. Eyes moved outward as his skull reshaped, granting him peripheral vision almost good enough to see all directions at once. Chitin formed from his blood and bone created a ridge of dragon plates that ran back his skull and all the way down to the new tail that was extending outward.
Fortunately, the uniform really did subsume itself into his flesh. The first attempt Talyarkinash had given him had shredded under the stress, coming apart and leaving him naked when he shifted back.
Dragons could blush, but right now nobody could see it under the bronze scales covering his face. He smiled, as much as he could with the new form of his jaw, too much like the Yuudixtl who had been his inspiration.
Crocodile smile.
“Can you still read me, Constable Grodray?” Gareth asked, his voice rumbling a rich bass in his own ears.
“Affirmative, Dankworth,” the man replied. “Go ahead.”
Gareth took several running steps and threw himself at the sky. He could fly from a standstill, pumping heavily to gain altitude, but this was much more efficient, using the tiny amount of breeze to gain a little lift.
Quickly, he was twenty meters in the air, racing along at sixty kilometers per hour as he rose higher. Grodray had given him no directions, other than to show off, so Gareth decided to stretch his abilities today.
Up and up, slowly orbiting the tower as a central beacon for his column, until he was nearly a thousand meters in the air. He rolled over and aimed himself to glide a little, back along the runway back to where their transport was parked.
There were a few birds up this high, but most had fled at the sight of the monstrous, strange beast breaking up the afternoon sky. A few predators continued to circle at what they thought might be a safe distance, but even they kept their orbits far wider than his, reacting like scalded cats when he turned one way or the other.
Finally, he turned, finding the line of the runway and pulling his wings in until just the tips stuck out, like tiny ailerons providing him control as he nosed over into freefall. Below, the equivalents of eagles and hawks scattered to the four winds with surprised cries.
Gareth rumbled a laugh, forgetting for a moment that the microphone was live.
“Everything okay?” Grodray asked, but it sounded more like a formality than anything.
“Speed drop,” Gareth replied. “Locals are a little nervous.”
“Roger that.”
His draco-form was streamlined. The final size he had reached when he had stopped growing as a Vanir was twenty-seven meters from sleek snout to spiky tail. Pulled in tight, he quickly reached a terminal velocity far greater than a human skydiver ever could.
And he had learned early on how much torque his wings could take before they buckled under the stress, so he slowly stretched his wings out, forcing his flight flatter and flatter as he went, transforming into the horizontal from the vertical that he had started.
He didn’t have an airspeed indicator gauge to track his speed, but his inner eyelid had dropped down, making everything just the slightest bit fuzzy while still letting him track large targets. Still, Talyarkinash had built him a communicator.
What else might it do?
“Can you track my airspeed?” Gareth asked as he flattened out and pumped his wings to keep him level and running, about twenty meters above the concrete apron below.
He would pass below his audience, if he was careful.
“Two hundred and eighty kph, Gareth,” Talyarkinash replied after a few seconds. “Peak during your dive was three hundred and fifteen.”
Wow. Faster than anything on the ground, and fast enough to catch most flying vehicles under computer control.
For fun, Gareth pulled back a little and shifted into an Immelmann maneuver, holding his wings still as he went straight up and stalled. An aircraft losing forward momentum like this would have to flip over and undo a stall, falling initially onto its tail.
Here, Gareth started his stall like normal, and then folded himself in two, pulling his wings in, reversing course like a diver coming off the high board. After a moment, he extended his wings again and flapping hard enough to hover in place fifty meters in the air.
For fun, he slowly pivoted on his tail at the same time, until he was facing the threesome in the tower from around seventy-five meters away, like the galaxy’s biggest hummingbird.
Not the meanest. Hummingbirds back home had attitudes like tiny T-Rexes, all bluster and fury, while still small enough to fit in your hand. He could gulp one down in a single bite if they decided to get feisty with him today.
Let’s see, speed, maneuverability, and hover displayed.
Gareth winged over and landed, more or less below the control tower window. Glancing up, he could see three faces leaned out and looking down, so he reared back and triggered the two glands in his upper chest, pressing out paired streams of liquid that ran up into his mouth.
One turned into a spray, and then the second mixed with it and ignited, reacting to the oxygen in the air and the misty spray to turn into a column of fire nearly thirty meters long for a second. There was nothing to burn, but he knew he would leave a scorch mark on the concrete that newcomers couldn’t explain.
Folks who had been there to watch him before would know. He was sure rumors were already floating about the Accord of Souls.
Fire-breathing-dragon. Gareth was pretty sure that both Grace and Nari would react with the same awe and trepidation as humans did.
“Did you need a strength demonstration?” Gareth rumbled. “I could lift one end of the transport, but I don’t think I could get the whole thing off of the ground.”
“That’s okay, Gareth,” Grodray was back on line. “Go ahead and return to normal for now. I want to talk about next steps.”
Gareth had landed on all fours for stability. He reared up now and let go of the terrible fire in his soul, feeling the energy collapse back down inside somewhere.
Talyarkinash had said that the ability was psionic, whatever that meant. Except that he didn’t have any biology or physics that could explain what he did. Neither did she.
Magic was as good a description an anything, he supposed. He wondered if Dr. Loughty would be able to do any better, but he doubted it, as far beyond Terran culture and technology as he found himself these days.
Still, he was happy when he looked down and his skin was covered in a blue scaled jumpsuit. He had believed the Nari scientist and her equipment, but there was always that least bit of doubt in the back of his mind.
Grodray emerged first, with Baker close on his heels. Talyarkinash was several seconds behind, but she probably went down every step, when the taller twosome didn’t have to. Not necessarily fair, but not a lot he could do about it.
“I had to see it with my own eyes,” Grodray said by way of apology. He held out a hand for Gareth to shake.
“Understood, sir,” Gareth replied. “I still don’t always believe it myself. What’s next?”
Something in the man’s face was off, the way Grodray’s eyes found Talyarkinash and he lost all emotion.
“Field work,” he said.
Gareth was confused. Doubly so when Talyarkinash smiled.
Prime Investigators
Eveth waited until they had returned Dankworth and Liamssen to the base, and then cleared that on their way back to town.
“Out with it,” Grodray said from the bench across from her. “You’ve been stewing for an hour, and too polite to say anything in front of those two. What’s eating you?”
“Is he ready?” she asked simply, compacting any number of arguments into those few words. Grodray was her boss, and a Prime Investigator, however secret that designation was. He made his own job, as he saw fit.
And the highest echelons of the Accord of Souls would back him. She could have opinions, but she was only a candidate to become a Prime Investigator herself, so she needed to be a team player right now, working within Grodray’s framework.
Grodray surprised her by smiling.
“Not really sure it matters, Eve,” he said. “I’m up to no good here.”
“How so?” she asked, a little lost.
Normally, Jackeith Grodray was deduction itself. Cold, calculating, logical. That was one of the reasons she had been given about why she’d initially been paired with the man, as her own approach was much more inductive. She could make fantastic, intuitive leaps, so he balanced her, so the story went.
Since the mask had come off, revealing that a well-respected Senior Constable, a simple Level Four, who was actually a Level Seven, she had seen a side of the man she had never really imagined.
“Playing a couple of hunches,” Grodray said.
“You?”
He laughed and leaned back into the chair with a twinkle in his eyes.
“One, Maximus has a deep and abiding hatred of Gareth,” Grodray said. “You’ve read the debriefing reports and the bio that Gareth helped assemble on the man.”
“Stalking horse,” Eveth replied, nodding with understanding. “Put him out in the open and see if you can draw Sarzynski out of the shadows to take a shot at him.”
“Correct,” Jackeith nodded. “But there’s a second element at play, and I want to see how that works.”
“What’s that?” Eveth pressed. What else could there be?
“I’ve watched a number of female officers and researchers around Gareth,” Grodray said. “Plus the original reports, and that young woman in the tea shop when he was first pulled through to Orgoth Vortai.”
“What about him?” she asked bluntly.
“And that’s the best part,” Grodray said with a dry chuckle. “You appear to be immune, but every other female Gareth Dankworth comes into contact with has a serious, visceral reaction to the man. And they did even when he was human, but becoming Vanir hasn’t changed it.”
“The fact that every woman wants to jump his bones?” Eveth asked.
“Except you,” her partner grinned.
“He’s human, Jack,” she snapped, finding a seam of coal underneath her words to ignite. “That’s disgusting.”
“They don’t know that,” he countered. “And if it works, I want to turn him loose in a few places, to see if that charm and magnetism can get us into a few areas where pure police work has failed.”
“And if it does?” she sneered.
“Then he breaks our case even further open, Eve,” the man turned serious. “I’ll get all the glory on this one, but you’re doing the hard work, and you’ll get credit in the right places.”
She liked that thought. On the one hand, that would be her ticket into the big leagues.
And maybe, if she was lucky, the two humans would manage to wipe each other out and save everyone else a lot of trouble.
Omelets
It was getting old.
Morty knew they were in the top ten most wanted people in the entire Accord of Souls, but it would be nice to be able to stay in the same apartment for more than a week before somebody tipped either the cops or his old friends from Zathus, as to where he and Xiomber were staying.
Today, supposedly, it had been the bad guys who got the call.
Fortunately, Xiomber had friends. Or was owed enough favors. Or maybe owed enough other people that they wanted to be able to collect on those debts in the future and couldn’t if he was dead.
Whatever. The phone had rung. A message had been conveyed. And they ran like hell for the door.
Somewhere, there was still a pot of tea cooling on a kitchen table with a fantastic view of that giant bronze statue: “Walking into Discovery.” It was a stupid name for a piece of art, but the Grace were weirdoes to begin with, so he wasn’t going to argue.
And Xiomber had found them a nice dive on the edge of downtown to get breakfast. Not too close to the old place, where someone might see them accidentally, but only three stops away on the first bus that had driven by.
Fortunately, after a month on the run, Morty’s entire life pretty much fit into a single bag. He had a few bolt holes scattered around the Accord, and he and Xiomber had set up a few joint efforts beyond that, but these days it really was possible to grab his comm off the counter, and his bag by the door, and walk out of an apartment forever.
“So who called?” Morty asked as the waiter delivered menus and a fresh pot of tea.
They were seated clear down at the back of the narrow joint, tucked into a tiny table that was invisible from the front door and most of the windows, back around where the counter wrapped and led to the restrooms. The joint had been decorated in white: walls, counter, floor, aprons; but it still had a dinginess that no amount of soap would ever get out. Too many cigarettes and plates of greasy bacon and eggs had passed through here over the years.
And the crowd was just starting to wind themselves up, but Morty could see three tables left for whoever managed to get here next. After that, he was pretty sure the line would be out the door, just from the smells coming from the kitchen.
Seriously, there were what looked like a couple of farmers at the counter, enjoying a break between milking cows and whatever else folks like that did in the morning. Except they had to have come all the way into town to eat here, because the nearest farms were like thirty kilometers away. Above them, a television was showing two pretty talking heads doing morning news and fluff, but the sound was off.
Morty studied the menu while Xiomber ruminated on the question he had posed.
“Nobody you know,” Xiomber finally said. “Old girlfriend I did striped scales for, back when she got married.”
“Ah, her,” Morty said. “She must still like you?”
“Enough,” Xiomber allowed with a vague shrug. “She got a whisper and put two and two together.”
“Do we need to get off this rock?” Morty asked, pouring some tea and letting it warm his mug.
“I don’t think we’re totally screwed yet,” his egg-brother nodded, pouring his own tea. “The old gang didn’t have many fingers here, so finding us requires that they use the locals. People will talk.”
“Yeah, but how soon until you run out of friends, or they get lucky?” Morty asked.
Xiomber shrugged.
“I had hoped that we could drop down the rabbit hole here, Morty,” he said. “Find someone to take us on faith and let us work for them for a while, at least until the heat died down, ya know?”
“The old man’s getting more desperate, not less,” Morty noted. “You saw what he did to Damabiath. I don’t want to know what a scaleless Yuudixtl looks like, m’kay?”
A sudden sound caught them both short, a low moan of surprise and shock rippling through the crowd. Morty and Xiomber both turned, but Morty had to half-stand out of his seat to see over the counter and know what was going on.
All heads had turned to the television screen over the counter, by the front door.
“Turn up the sound,” somebody yelled.
A Warreth waitress fumbled with a remote control for a few seconds before she found the right buttons.
“…repeating our top story, an explosion occurred just a few minutes ago in a downtown apartment tower, blowing out windows across the street, but apparently confined to just one apartment. Fire and police are responding, and we’ve got the first images from our Morning Three Eye In The Sky drone,” the female, a Grace, was saying.
The image was zoomed in on a blackened window, smoke oozing out, before the camera pulled back to show the rest of the tower and part of the street. The operator slowly rotated the hovering camera in place to show windows shattered, but it looked like a pretty clean explosion.
It helped that tower blocks like this were generally self-contained reinforced-concrete shells. All the boom would tend to go outward, and usually a fire would be contained to just one flat. Defensive architecture was a hallmark of the Accord. Keep everybody safe.
Morty blew the air out of his lungs and sat down hard, muttering profanities under his breath.
“Yeah,” Xiomber said. “I saw the same thing. Now I’m really glad we left when we did.”
Morty wasn’t sure exactly how somebody had killed their apartment. Explosive shaped charge on the front door? Missile in through the kitchen window?
Maybe they had kicked in the door, found that Morty and his egg-brother gone, then lost their temper? Morty would have been tempted to stake the place out, on the off-chance that the two fugitives would return, but apparently Maximus and his people already knew they had flown the coop.
That looked like a message. And an unpleasant one.
Morty sighed and picked up the menu.
“We owe your old girlfriend big time,” he muttered.
“That’s exactly what she said,” Xiomber smiled back grimly. “She said it would probably make the morning news, whatever it was, and we should walk out immediately. Thoughts?”
“Omelet with everything,” Morty replied absently. “Gimme lots of carbs and protein this morning because I got a feeling it’s only going to get worse from here.”
“I meant about us,” Xiomber groused.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Morty snapped. “I’m beginning to wonder if we’re out of rope, Xiomber. Like we have to finally do something amazingly stupid if we want to survive all this. Lots of broken eggs in our future.”
Xiomber’s eyes slitted down tight, and his lids dropped halfway.
“How stupid?” he asked.
The waiter interrupted at that moment. Morty went all in, obviously afraid that this might be his last nice meal for a while, and he could always stuff the other half into a to-go box and carry it with him for lunch.
Xiomber started easy, but saw something in Morty’s eyes that appeared to unsettle him. He ordered the ribeye with eggs and hash, instead of a fruit and greens salad. The waiter smiled and departed.
“How stupid?” Xiomber repeated, but his heart wasn’t filled with anger. Morty could see that.
“Let’s find Gareth,” he said quietly.
“You know who has him,” Xiomber snapped, keeping his own voice as low as possible.
“Yeah,” Morty acknowledged. “But I’d rather spend the next forty years complaining that I’ve read the entire prison library than be dead by lunchtime, okay? We can always get ourselves rehabilitated later.”
“You think they’ll let us out of prison in this lifetime, egg-brother?” Xiomber sneered.
“The crazy lizard who started all this has had a significant change of heart, brother,” Morty said. “I screwed up, big time, and nearly brought the entire Accord of Souls down. I own that, yes, but I’ve spent the last two months trying to save civilization from all those crazy bastards. Do you want an immortal super-human ruling the Accord for the rest of time? No. Hell, I’d be happy if anyone ever figured out how to summon back the Chaa and let them fix everything.”
“You’d be in hell, Morty,” his brother said. “And I’d be with you.”
“And the galaxy would survive, Xiomber,” he snapped. “Maximus would be dealt with. Gareth’s people would either be stuffed back into their hole or modified enough to be added to the Accord. People like you and I could go back to whatever petty crime and juvenile shenanigans the Elders left us as crumbs if they didn’t just wipe us from existence. But the galaxy would be safe.”
“Gareth?” Xiomber asked morosely after a moment. “You realize all the cops on this planet are pretty bent, right?”
“Yeah,” Morty said. “I figure either Hurquar or Orgoth Vortai should be our next step. Those two Constables were from Hurquar, but I don’t know if they went back.”
“No, I like Orgoth Vortai,” Xiomber said. “Let’s take it back to where it began. Is Orgoth Vortai going to be safe? That’s the next question.”
Morty nodded.
“No place is safe,” Morty said. “But Omerlon’s got no reason to like Maximus. Less if that’s who did Damabiath.”
But Morty liked the thought of Orgoth Vortai as well.
Knowing the Grace, they would see the whole thing as a giant piece of insane performance art.
But for the bombs going off, Morty would, too.
Tip
A knock at the door brought Gareth’s head up. He had been quietly reading criminal statutes, and making notes on a pad of paper as a cross-referenced index, comparing the Accord of Souls legal system to Earth Force. The table was covered with piles of paper and note cards, but he was almost done. After this, time to begin memorizing some of the more interesting details of the seventeen species that made up the Accord.
“Come in,” he yelled.
The door was never locked. He had no reason to lock it as most of the people at this facility generally stayed well away from him anyway.
Oh, they were friendly enough, but all of them belonged to species that were within two or three percent of the absolute limits of genetic engineering and there was always some element of jealousy as to what he could do.
And nobody else could turn into a dragon, so he had to be an alien of some sort, masquerading as a Vanir. Eventually, someone would probably figure it out. All hell would probably break loose when they did.
The door opened slowly. Talyarkinash poked her head in and looked around before opening it the rest of the way and stepping in.
“I forget that you need so little sleep as well,” she began, a smile that went all the way to her ear tips lighting up her face. “I was afraid I would be waking you up.”
Gareth rose and smiled back.
“Homework,” he gestured to the stacks of paper on the table between them.
A thought struck him as he looked down.
“Did you modify my brain?” he asked suddenly. “This didn’t used to be this easy.”
People with fur on their face could hide a blush. But he had spent enough time around the Nari woman to see the subtle signs. The way her whiskers twitched back. Her ears turned a quarter rear as well. The pupils opened wider than necessary for the light in here.
“Maybe a little,” she said in an off-hand way as she entered. “Maximus was already a genius, so I thought you could always use a bump.”
“How much?” he pressed, sitting back down as clues and hints began to coalesce.
“There is a line, according to what Sarzynski told Morty and Xiomber,” she offered, stepping fully into the room and closing the door behind her. “On the other side of that line, you get genius, but frequently human artists are also insane, according to his understanding of human history. To us, that is a relative concept, since all humans are completely deranged to begin with.”
She said the last with a grin that brought a smile to Gareth’s face as well. Nobody had worked as closely with any human as she had with him over the last six weeks. She was now the Accord’s certifiable expert.
“You said on the other side of that line,” Gareth prodded her.
“Correct,” she agreed. “You were already well above average for humans, by your standards, but there was still space to bump you up further, so I did. Right now, you straddle that line, but that just means your memory is sharper and your reactions have improved some. Oh, and all your senses are sharper than before, but not so bad as to overwhelm you, but you already knew that.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder how I could memorize so much material, so quickly, but there was just too much I needed to know, so I come back here after dinner and read and take notes until after zero.”
“I’m glad it has worked out,” Talyarkinash admitted. “So much of what I was doing was guesswork, taking you and extrapolating along predicted lines to what I hoped were logical conclusions. And turning you into a dragon.”
He grinned from ear to ear.
“Every kid wants to be a dragon, when they’re about seven,” he said. “Right after the dinosaur phase and before astronaut. It’s a human thing.”
“I see,” she nodded and shrugged.
Being the best expert on humans they had didn’t make her an expert on the species. Gareth was better for that, but nobody could bring themselves to fully trust him. He knew that.
Maybe Talyarkinash, but that was about it.
“You have news?” he asked, prompting her back from where he had derailed her.
Talyarkinash moved to the table and pulled the other chair. It was Nari-sized, so she could join him for tea or to chat.
“We’ve received orders to pack our personal gear,” she said nervously. “Senior Constable Grodray is relocating us to Orgoth Vortai.”
“Why there?” Gareth asked.
She shrugged meaningfully.
“Perhaps they have a tip?” she offered. “Maybe they just want someplace relatively used to strange things. You can’t get much weirder than the homeworld of the Grace.”
Gareth shrugged in turn.
“How soon until we leave?” he looked at his piles and began sorting them into things to keep and things to recycle.
“There will be a shuttle for us mid-day tomorrow,” Talyarkinash said. “Around fifteen hours.”
Gareth turned and looked at the closet door. It was closed, but he could have picked out every outfit in there blindfolded.
There wasn’t much to begin with. Beyond two Constabulary uniforms, there was his Secret Agent/cowboy outfit that he had been wearing when Marc captured him. A set of lovely robes that Morty had bought, but he had never worn. And his Sky Patrol uniform.
None of them fit him, being sized for the human he had been, once upon a time, but he wasn’t about to lose them. Any of them.
At least in the future, laundry was a much easier task. Walk into the booth fully clothed and let all the various beams and radiations clean you and your clothes at the same time. Gareth had two more of Talyarkinash’s special uniforms, designed to morph with him. One tunic was for normal duty, while the other was a touch fancier and would be for those weird, formal occasions where he was expected to be in dress uniform.
He hadn’t been to anything like that yet, but supposed that he might have just graduated and be ready to become a Deputy Agent again.
Starting at the bottom was okay. He was a cop and there was work to be done.
“Thinking about your past?” Talyarkinash asked when he turned back to face her.
“My future, actually,” he said. “The past is lost. I haven’t made peace with that yet, but I’m working on it.”
“You miss her?” she said. It was more of a statement, but it sounded enough like a question.
“Every day,” Gareth sighed. “If it wasn’t such an amazingly bad idea, I’d sneak back to Earth and bring her here with me. Have you turn her into a Vanir so we could live happily ever after. The Constabulary would never accept it, though. There are already too many humans here.”
She wanted to say something. He could see it in her eyes, but she refrained. There wasn’t much to say at that point. He could never go home, and he would probably end up in a cell, once he captured or killed Marc.
It would be apocalyptic, their final battle. Gareth had no doubts about that. Hopefully, he would prevail, and could bring peace to the Accord of Souls. Whether Marc would allow himself to be taken alive was another question.
Either way, the end of Marc Sarzynski’s reign of terror would also be the end of Gareth’s freedom. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but duty was duty. Stop Marc first. Then deal with spending the rest of his days in prison as an illegal alien who was too dangerous to allow to roam free.
Rather than speak, Talyarkinash held out a hand. Gareth took it and held on.
It was nice to have friends, because they both knew whatever was coming was likely to get ugly, before it might ever get better.
Into The Shadows
“We knew they weren’t there,” Marc heard Zorge explain. “But, following orders, we planted a small bomb anyway and annihilated the place with fire.”
Zorge paused at that point. When Marc turned to stare at him, the Nari spymaster was looking for the right words. Something that would get to the heart of the matter, without offending the crazy human boss who had cut such a bloody swathe across the Accord.
The group had taken over a small resort on the outskirts of the city of Uwethis, on Kani. It was about as far from the civilized core of the Accord as one could get and still have indoor plumbing, as the joke went. Planetary population still under a half billion souls, but a good mix of species in the city. And one of the lowest rates of cops to citizens in known space. A safe enough place to hide while he rebuilt the organization.
Marc relaxed on an overstuffed chair done in green, while the Nari was on an equally-over-stuffed couch in gray and yellow squares. Hideous, but he wasn’t an interior decorator.
“Why? you were wanting to ask?” Marc smiled as the pause stretched.
“Something like that, yes,” Zorge replied defensively.
“They weren’t there, but had been,” Marc explained. “The criminal underground on Churquark isn’t as well organized as Zathus had been. Not as powerful either, relying too much on corrupt politicians and mid-level folks to get by. They might have considered letting things slide.”
“So bombing the place sends a message?” Zorge asked. “To whom?”
“Everyone,” Marc actually felt a smile on his face. Those were rare, these days. “It tells those two that I can find them, and that I won’t accept their apologies. It reminds the local underworld that anyone wanting to shelter the two lizardmen will be dealing with me, personally. It tells the Constabulary that things are more rotten than they think, so they’ll concentrate more effort on Churquark than they had been.”
“Net result, drive Morty and Xiomber off planet, right about the time the cops drop a ton of bricks on the place,” Zorge concluded. “They escape the dragnet, and nobody else?”
“Exactly,” Marc said. “Think of it as a shell game. Everyone will be looking on Churquark, where the marble is not hiding. I don’t know where they’ll go, but we’ve made the rest of the people around them unwelcoming, so they’ll have no choice but to run. Eventually, we’ll find them. Or the cops will.”
“Won’t they talk?” Zorge asked. “Tell the cops everything they know, trying to buy a reduced sentence?”
“Everything they know doesn’t include what I’m up to now,” Marc smiled. “You’re still thinking defensively.”
“And we’re rebuilding, while bringing down all the other gangs,” Zorge breathed. “But won’t that make it harder for us, if they start bringing in honest politicians? Or clean up the local police departments?”
“For a while,” Marc said. “I’ve been studying the Accord’s history, and one thing is clear. The structure they built was never going to last forever. Too fragile. The Vanir might be all law-and-order as a rule, but their place at the top of the hierarchy of things tends to rub a lot of the other species the wrong way. And so you get an underclass that don’t see how they can get ahead when the Vanir are so dominant.”
“Which breeds resentment, and creates the conditions for the underworld to thrive,” Zorge agreed.
“And I don’t see that pattern changing,” Marc said. “At least not for several more centuries. At some point, the Chaa might just have to come back and fix things if they want to go back to the old days, but I’m here now, and nobody’s done anything about it, so either they don’t see me as a threat, or, more likely, they don’t care.”
“And you plan to be around for that long still?”
“Correct,” Marc said.
He studied the Nari closely, but the man didn’t have any obvious qualms. Of course, without Maximus protecting him, the man would be a cell quickly enough. They were all in the chute now, and they knew it.
Victory or death.
Zorge shrugged.
“So I have my teams watching for all the key players,” Zorge continued. “Grodray and Baker disappeared for three days last week, but they’re back on Hurquar now, working to unravel everything there.”
Marc nodded.
“My theory is that they went to visit Gareth Dankworth, wherever he had been hidden,” Marc replied. “Now they’re getting desperate enough to use him.”
“Should we target him for anything?”
“No,” Marc said firmly. “Just watch him for now. Perhaps he’ll lead us to Morty and Xiomber. If he does, we’ll sweep them all up, but I need better weapons, if I’m going to take on a star dragon.”
“That’s Maiair’s department,” Zorge said.
“Indeed,” Marc agreed. “Anything else? Then send her in next.”
“Yes, sir.”
And the Nari spymaster was gone.
Marc looked around the room. Not bad, as resorts in the middle of nowhere went. Wood paneling on the walls made them feel small and intimate. Strange knick-knacks seemed to cover every free space on the abundant bookshelves, although he had no interest in ever reading the vast array of cozy mysteries and romances that the Accord writers seemed to generate on an annual basis.
He had a small front room with the couch, the overstuffed chair, and a writing hutch that could fold down. Down a short passageway was a tiny bathroom on the left, a kitchenette at the end, and a sleeping room barely big enough for the bed on the right. But this wasn’t a place tourists stayed all day.
They were close to a variety of what Marc would have called nature preserves back on Earth. Places to hike and camp, all a short ride away. The resort had a kitchen and a small bar up in the main building, but Marc had arranged to rent the entire facility for a month. It was the off-season on Kani, not far past the middle of winter at this latitude, so the owner had made them a great deal, especially when Marc didn’t need staff on hand for cooking and such.
He could have the place to himself for a while, cheap, and let his people work. Singles and doubles coming and going wouldn’t excite any gossip with the locals. They had been given a cover story of a small religious group on a retreat, so they could be self-contained.
Let the storm blow over the Accord right now, while he was sheltered. The fundamental mechanics had not changed, so all Gareth and the Constables could do would be to imprison the current batch of criminals, until Marc could bend the new batch to his will.
It might take a decade, but Vanir were long-lived folk to begin with, and he had plans for upgrading this body.
Emperor Marc. Not even Marc the First, as he planned to live as close to forever as medicine and genetics would allow, so he would give up the throne when it was taken from him in death, or when one of his sons finally impressed him enough to take over.
God/Emperor. Yes, that sounded more accurate.
A knock at the door, and then Maiair entered a moment later. Her crimson headcrest was carefully at half-mast. Unsure but firm and proud. Not challenging his authority, but not backing off of her own.
Good.
He had been afraid that the stress of the last month might have ground the Warreth woman down. Used her up. Broken her.
He could see he had been wrong.
“You wanted to see me?” she asked in a voice that found that perfect spot between subservient and sarcastic.
“Yes,” he smiled at her, gesturing to the sofa for her to sit. Hopefully, she would be at ease.
Like Zorge, she was poised at the edge of the seat rather than putting her weight back.
“Things are beginning to move,” Marc began. “Shortly, all of the enemy pieces will be on the table again, and we can begin our more complex gambits.”
“What do I need to concentrate on?” she asked, her headcrest perking up some, fluffing a little as she grew more confident in the direction of the meeting.
“Gareth St. John Dankworth is a wild card, Maiair,” Marc said quietly. “Zorge has his people trying to get me information from the Constables, as to what his capabilities truly are, but without Liamssen’s notes, we’re only guessing. I need you to find me a competent geneticist that we own, or can turn.”
“Kidnap?” she hazarded.
“No,” Marc replied flatly. “I’ll be putting my life in his hands, so I want one with a god complex and so much intellectual arrogance that he sees me as a challenge for his brilliance, rather than as an opportunity to destroy me in one shot.”
“They come in flavors,” she observed. “What kinds of upgrades were you needing for yourself? Liamssen was among the best as a generalist, and the rest are being prodded enough by the Constables enough to be looking over their shoulders constantly.”
“I am bigger and stronger than most Vanir,” Marc noted. “Smarter than just about all of them, as well. But Dankworth and the others didn’t stop there. He can turn into a flipping dragon, for God’s sake. I need something to counter that, but I’m not sure what, yet.”
“Draco-form?” she asked carefully.
“This is a genetic change, Maiair,” he replied. “If Dankworth ever had children with a Vanir woman, it would probably be a trait that was passed down. If the Accord isn’t ready for humans, they really won’t be able to deal with lycanthropic dragons. No, I’m looking to found a dynasty, so I need to get as close to immortality as we can get, which won’t be that hard, but I want to be able to do something nobody else in the Accord can do.”
“Which is?” she hesitated, sensing something that left her nervous.
More nervous than she already was.
“Breed with other species,” Marc replied carefully, almost tenderly. “There’s no reason all my children should be Vanir, Maiair.”
She sucked a nearly-silent gasp and froze perfectly still, like a rabbit in the grass hearing an owl’s cry.
Marc left the silence hanging. She had hinted at such things earlier, but she probably never realized that Marc Sarzynski was capable of going there intellectually. The various species of the Accord of Souls had been fixed in place by the Chaa when most of them were Uplifted, and the Vanir became Those Left Behind. They could marry and live happy lives, but never cross-breed.
Hell, most of them had different chromosome counts, so fertility was truly impossible.
But if he told a conference of geneticists that something was simply impossible, a few would stand up and challenge him. Those were the ones he wanted. Immortality wasn’t a red flag they could look at on a readout. It had to be inferred from a host of indicators all being too healthy at the same time.
Perhaps one who would make him immortal, and a second who could help Marc create a whole series of ruling castes over the current species. He had been serious about bringing in a few humans and adding them in as dons and capos. And his own children would probably require fifty years before they were stable enough as a royal family.
But Marc was measuring time in millennia.
“You’re sure?” she finally spoke.
Her headcrest had nearly collapsed, but now it had risen again. Puffed out feathers around her head had relaxed as the moment of shock passed.
“We have the opportunity to reshape the Accord of Souls, Maiair,” Marc almost whispered. “I see no reason to limit things to the Vanir. The Warreth should have a chance to shine, as should the Nari and even the Grace. I’m less confident in some of the other species, but we can look. Can you find me the right doctor?”
He paused again. This was where things got tricky.
On the one hand, she knew he was going to create a ruling caste of humans, led by a royal family of heavily modified Vanir. On the other, he had just offered her the chance to place her own offspring into that level of power as well.
Permanently.
And the best part? All of his children would not be bound by the Accord of Souls, so he would have a permanent underclass of peons that were generally incapable of doing the kinds of violence necessary to stop him.
He would only have to worry about the humans he brought over, and his own children.
And Gareth St. John Dankworth.
Cotton Candy Skies
Gareth just couldn’t wrap his head around the color of the daytime sky overhead. Not quite as pink as cotton candy, but not so far down into orange as to be salmon-colored. It haunted him, but that had been the moment when he truly understood that he stood under alien skies. Looking up and not seeing blue.
Xiomber had explained it to him eventually. The weird bacteria and things that floated in the sky, plus a soft, constant haze of dust from the deserts on the continent of Mishalque. Orgoth Vortai had more land than Earth, only some forty percent being oceans, rather than the seventy-five percent back home. Heat made that desert largely uninhabitable, except by researchers who burrowed down into the rocks by day for coolness.
But he was back in Londra now. Gareth hadn’t even known the name of the city as he was passing through it. One minute he had been at The Arsenal. The next, he was in a park on the other side of town, headed to a tea shop…
“You have a very far-away look on your face, Dankworth,” Eveth Baker said in a voice strong enough to jar him out of daydreams.
“Last time I was here, six weeks ago, I was on planet for all of about six hours,” he replied. “Still completely trapped in culture shock and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.”
“And it made that big of impression on you?” she asked. Her voice had lost some of the ragged anger that had been with her all day.
She started to walk, so Gareth fell into stride with her. It was weird, working with a female partner. Back home, the few Women’s Auxiliaries of Earth Force were more secretaries and such, rather than agents. Although, come to think about it, Gareth could think of a few women he had known who could have done this job at least as well as him. Maybe better.
Here, he was the junior agent, but Baker was treating him like a peer, rather than a semi-feral animal she needed to keep on a tight leash.
Pippa, for example, could have done this. She had graduated third in her entire class from college, but couldn’t go on to get an advanced degree because no reputable program would enroll her, so she was doing something like Reading The Law to do advanced stellar physics with her father. She could have certainly handled this.
He had been raised that way, but Gareth wasn’t sure now why women were thought to be such frail, fragile creatures, to be protected at all costs. Eveth Baker was one of the toughest people he had ever met.
“Dankworth?” Baker prodded.
He had fallen silent in thought.
“The city? Yes,” he said, finding his way back to conversation. “Still culture shocking over all the things females do here as a matter of course, where back home they can’t.”
“That sounds stupid,” Constable Baker decided.
Gareth shrugged. He really couldn’t argue, having just spent the last six weeks surrounded by competent, capable females doing things that he had always thought of as a man’s job.
“What’s the next stop?” he asked instead.
They were dressed like cops today. Both in the steel-blue bodysuits with the bright blue ring over their hearts as a badge. Like always, she wasn’t wearing the extra tunic over the top, but Gareth was trying to be the spit-and-polish rookie cop here, so he had everything exactly to regulation, including the white beret.
That also included a stun pistol like hers. Plus strict instructions from Eveth Baker never to draw it. He would probably do so automatically, if danger appeared, but he would argue with her over it afterwards.
She really meant in most situations, and he found that acceptable. They weren’t going to find Marc Sarzynski while randomly checking bars and dives.
No, he was out here beating the bushes in order to drive the game towards Senior Constable Grodray. There would be no glory for Gareth Dankworth, but that was acceptable as well. The fewer people that knew he existed in the Accord of Souls, the better everything was likely to be.
“Here,” Baker pointed to a building that had remained behind when the neighborhood was gentrified and redone at some point in the recent past.
The apartment towers behind him had a recent feel to them, like a row of houses had been leveled and a massive stack of flats with a giant picture of a rooster on the side put in instead, with two stories of retail and office space at the bottom.
This was a solitary building in front of them. One story tall. Sitting on a corner facing the main street they were on as well as the side. The outside walls were wood, with neon signs for things Gareth presumed were local beers. It had that kind of feel to it.
Weirdly, the front door was Dutch. The top half was open, and the whole sat recessed at a forty-five degree angle, facing the center of the intersection rather than either street. Baker unlatched the bottom half and pushed it in.
Gareth followed her into a space that managed to carefully surf that line between upscale restaurant and neighborhood dive bar. Four booths ran down the right hand wall, with a hallway indicating restrooms beyond.
On the left, high and low tables filled the bulk of the space. Maybe forty of them, all told, with a waist-high, wrought-iron fence separating the space from a bar that ran halfway across the back wall. A window and a door beside the bar showed a kitchen, but Gareth could already tell that from the smells. Outside had been nice, a smell like a Sunday afternoon grilling.
Inside, the smells trebled. Gareth’s stomach rumbled in anticipation of the meat and yummies to be had here.
Three people sat at the bar, their backs to he and Baker as they came in. A Grace bartender watched them from under hooded eyes and restive coils, but gestured to the room.
“Anywhere you like,” he called in a voice that was just about as friendly as he was required to be to cops walking in in the middle of the afternoon.
Baker led him to one of the booths and slid in, tapping the other side to indicate where he should go. He ended up with his back to the front door, the bar on his left, and the hallway in front of him, over her shoulder.
The menus were meat. It came grilled, fried, barbequed, sous vide, and probably tartar. Gareth could recognize about half of the animals that were the source by now. Vegetables came grilled as a side, or possibly in a salad for someone that had been dragged along kicking and screaming by hungry carnivores.
Baker studied the menu, while Gareth looked over at the inhabitants.
The Grace woman on the closest end of the bar looked over as they sat, blanched, and quickly paid her bill and vanished. A Borren drunk at the other end leaned back enough to look over and then went back to his beer. Or whatever it was in his glass.
The man in the middle was a species Gareth had never met before, though he had studied them. Th'Tarni.
They reminded Gareth of wood elves, as portrayed in stories. A little over five feet tall, with a dusky skin that wasn’t gray and wasn’t brown and wasn’t smoke, but somewhere in the middle of all three. Back home, he might have belonged to the negro subgroup, based on the color of his skin and his flat nose. They weren’t that common in Earth Force Sky Patrol, so Gareth had never really interacted with them.
This man’s eyes were the most fascinating. They didn’t have an iris and pupil, like most species, but simply a transparent orb for an eyeball, lit from within with a shy, baby-blue light that stood out against the gray-brown skin. Similar dots of color on his skin were freckles, or the roots of his hair. That same hair faded to gray and then black quickly, but always had some of the cerulean along all edges, like it was part of a neon sign.
The ears were pointed, like Gareth’s were now, but instead of going straight up, this man’s flowed backwards and then rose to points nearly even with the back of his skull. They also glowed with the same internal light.
It was like the man was made of light and given a shell. Or maybe he was a gigantic lightning bug given human form by the Chaa.
The man turned as he watched and glared at Gareth, almost challenging. Gareth realized he was staring and quickly turned his head down to study the menu again, blushing furiously.
He thought he heard a snicker come from Baker, but couldn’t be sure and wasn’t going to ask.
Suddenly, music engulfed the room. Gareth glanced over and the bartender was responsible. Probably to keep conversations more private. Maybe it was just late enough in the day that this was when he normally turned the jukebox on.
And pigs might fly.
The bartender meandered over, making it clear from his stance that he was serving them because they had walked in and had badges, and not because he liked their kind in his joint.
“What’ll it be?” he called over the music in a rasp that bordered on rude.
Gareth checked the small section at the bottom of the drinks menu. Seventy-three kinds of beer and hard cider. Eight things without. Half of those were mixers in hard drinks.
“Cola,” he said simply.
“Anything in it?” the man almost sneered.
Gareth fixed him with a hard stare.
“Ice,” he said in a growling tone.
The Grace blinked and recoiled, ever so slightly.
Two can play at that game, buddy.
“Coffee,” Baker added. “Hot and black. Preferable strong enough to stand a knife up in it.”
“See what I can do,” the Grace man moved away quickly.
Like they were toxic to his physical being, not just his state of mind.
“We eating?” Gareth asked quietly, letting the music cover his tones. “And is it safe to eat here?”
Baker actually let go of her hard-ass persona long enough to give him a genuine smile.
“Very safe,” she said in a similar, quiet voice. “Best bacon on the planet, as far as I’m concerned. And don’t let Ray’s demeanor fool you. He’s been a source for me for years. This is all just an act, so feel free to bad cop him as much as you think he deserves.”
“Roger that,” Gareth acknowledged.
The bartender, Ray apparently, returned a few minutes later with a brown-black glass for Gareth, with ice, and a mug of coffee and additives for Baker. She ordered a pulled pork sandwich and a plate-of-bacon sampler. Gareth got a mac and cheese with all the bacon added it.
Seriously, they had bacon made from three different kinds of animals. None of them were pigs. How weird was that?
About the time that more customers started to wander in, the Th'Tarni man paid his bill. He fixed Gareth with a long, appraising stare, and then sauntered out of the room like the King of Brooklyn, robes swishing to show off elaborate embroideries over the front and sleeves. Gareth decided the man needed a small hat, maybe a kufi or a chador, to make the outfit perfect, but maybe the colorful hair didn’t like a lid.
It must be happy hour, Gareth decided. By the time food was delivered, nearly a quarter of the tables in here suddenly had custom, and a Vanir waitress had come on duty.
She wasn’t as tough-looking as Baker, nor all that attractive as a woman. Tall and kind dumpy, with too many tattoos visible and a paunch around the middle. She did had a smile for him, every time she caught him looking over, though.
The food was absolutely fantastic. Nothing like what his Mom would have cooked, but his mother wasn’t that good of a cook, preferring to pull something out of the freezer and either toss it into the stove or the microwave-emitter. Or better, when Gareth had finally gotten old enough, to have him do it himself.
He looked down and considered licking the bowl clean but his tongue wasn’t long enough. If he had gotten any bread, this would have been the time to smear it and pick up any cheese sauce left.
Baker was watching him with mirthful eyes when he looked up, rather at odds with how she had been for the last three days. Gareth studied her carefully, like she was about to ask him a final exam question that counted for twenty-five percent of his grade.
“You’re very quiet for a rookie,” she observed.
“I’m only a rookie in your department, Baker,” he said sincerely. “I’ve been doing this for almost eight years in mine. Plus, I don’t want to screw up your investigation, so I’m trying to listen and learn.”
She nodded slowly. The grin hadn’t left her eyes, even as the rest of her face fell into seriousness.
The bartender, Ray, approached in his casual, unruffled-by-cops saunter, and placed a small, black binder on the table with a “Whenever you’re ready,” before he fled back to the bar.
Baker pulled out her wallet from a thigh pouch, extracting a credit card plus something else. Gareth thought he saw her palm a piece of paper and stick it into the binder with her card, closing it and laying it flat on the edge of the table.
Gareth concentrated on what was left of his cola, the music, and the crowd. He could tell the place had gentrified and done so fairly recently. A young Nari woman walked in and one point and asked about a job, but Ray explained that everybody loved this place so much that nobody ever quit. She left, but Gareth could tell she was from the old neighborhood, not the place that it was turning into.
Others at various tables had the feel of businessmen out for a late meeting happy hour beer, or an early dinner before heading out for a night on the town.
Ray came back and retrieved the binder. Gareth thought he detected a ghost of a nod between Ray and Baker, but it might have been his imagination.
Baker didn’t say anything, just kept watching over his shoulder.
A few minutes later, Ray emerged from the back and slid the binder in front of Baker, again retreating, almost disdainfully, rather than make small talk.
Baker opened it, fiddled around with the papers inside, and then signed one. Again, Gareth thought he saw her palm a folded piece of paper, but she slid out of the booth quickly and stood before he could ask her about it.
Gareth joined her. In addition to being a cop in this joint, he and Baker were the only two Vanir, other than the waitress. Gareth almost felt like he was walking in a middle school lunch hall, being a head or two taller than almost everyone else.
It might have been his imagination, but there seemed to be a small bubble of silence that rippled along with them as they exited. Each table they had passed had seemed to quiet down for a beat, perhaps as the occupants looked over, before it picked up again.
Back out on the street, Baker retraced her steps with a jaunty stride. Gareth had to stretch his legs just to keep up with her, which was another strange feeling.
“You done good in there, Dankworth,” she said after they had gotten two blocks away. “Professional without looking like a rookie. Not letting anything throw you off. Nicely done.”
“Why was Tornado so important?” he asked, referring to the restaurant behind them.
“Ray, the bartender?” she said. “He owns it, and has for a long time, but it has always been something of an underworld hangout. Neutral ground. Everyone minds their manners in there, and nobody says anything. Probably a quarter of the people in there with us had criminal records, possibly active warrants.”
“And you let a place like that exist?” Gareth was aghast.
“Better the devil you know,” she replied carefully. “Plus, Ray provides a forum where enemies can meet and work things out. Better than bloodshed. Even cops can have conversations with criminals in there, as long as nobody raids the place.”
“What would happen if they got raided?” Gareth asked.
This was so far outside his normal expectations of law enforcement that he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
“Everybody would make common cause on the person responsible,” she said in a serious voice. “That includes the Constabulary helping the local dons take someone down. It’s not the best arrangement, but it keeps a lid on things, at least until we can do more to get rid of the rotten elements in society. That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” he asked, almost faltering in his stride.
“You,” she agreed. “When those two Yuudixtl brought you here, they started a chain of events. Sarzynski overplayed his hand and we nearly broke his organization. Right now, he’s spending more time fighting with the underworld than with us. More thugs have been arrested in the last month than the previous year. Crooked prosecutors are suddenly having to go to court because of the increased visibility, and bad guys are going to jail rather than getting off on technicalities and witnesses refusing to cooperate.”
“Huh,” Gareth replied. “I’ve been off training and studying, so I didn’t see any of this.”
“Yes,” she said. “We’ve intentionally kept you in the dark up until now. But Grodray wants you visible now. Being seen with me. Word will get around.”
“Who are we looking for?” Gareth said.
Baker stopped walking now and pulled out her comm. She called an auto-taxi and turned to him.
“Anybody that panics when they see you,” she said with a predatory smile. “You don’t exist, so you’re just another Vanir cop. But if they know anything different, I want to put them in a small room and sweat them.”
“Okay,” Gareth said as the car landed and the door opened.
He followed her inside and buckled his belt.
“And that note you passed Ray?” he continued.
That got him another smile. Gareth wasn’t sure he was a ready for an Eveth Baker who smiled a lot.
“I told him I wanted a name,” she said, pulling the paper out.
She unfolded it and read it quickly, nodding to herself.
“Now the fun begins,” she smiled at him.
Gareth wondered if a shark smiled like that, right before he took a bite out of your leg.
“What’s next?” he asked.
“Now we put your superpower to work,” she replied.
Gareth really didn’t like the sound of that.
Possibilities
She found the closed door intimidating, but Talyarkinash didn’t let that stop her. It was unlocked she found, so she pushed it in and entered the room.
From the outside, this was just another tower in Londra, the art capital of Orgoth Vortai. And that was all the Grace really cared about. Art.
The actual capital city, where politics got done, was Burich, but that was a sleepy, college town two hundred kilometers up the Temin River. All the action was in Londra, or possibly down in Xarxe, the port city down on the delta where so many musicians had gathered together.
Talyarkinash preferred Londra. Living in a tower with a mix of flats and offices, depending on the floor and the lift tube you used. There was supposedly an indoor arcade filled with shops and restaurants, taking up the first two floors above ground and three below, but she had never seen it.
She was still in police custody, even if everyone was too polite to call her a prisoner to her face. She did not leave this floor without an armed escort, so she could call it what it was.
The room she entered was bland and meaningless. That took significant work on the homeworld of the Grace, since they saw any blank wall as an invitation and excuse to commit art. Someone had consciously undone this room. White walls greeted her, with pedestrian watercolor pictures on two walls, plus a large picture window looking out over the rest of the city. Brown carpets as bland as the walls under her feet.
Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray was already seated across from her, with a stack of folders off to one side. The small room was dominated by a cherry-oak table, Vanir-sized, that worked as either a desk or a conference table for a small group. Another Vanir, this one a woman, was seated on Grodray’s right.
Like him, she wore the generic uniform of the Constabulary. They didn’t wear names or ranks indicators of any kind, unlike most of the police departments she had ever known, so Talyarkinash had no way of identifying the woman’s place in things, except by age.
She had been skinnier when she was younger, that much was obvious, but the Vanir woman was much older now. Not plump, but not the lean huntress the younger version had obviously been. More senior. Possibly into her eighth or tenth decade. Dark hair was now streaked with silver and white. The flesh of her neck was slack, and her eyes and forehead were a maze of wrinkles that Talyarkinash suspected led one to the minotaur, rather than the treasure.
Grodray rose as Talyarkinash closed the door carefully.
“Dr. Talyarkinash Liamssen, this is Dr. Dalton Fitzroy,” Grodray introduced the woman. “Prime Investigator with an emphasis on biology and genetics.”
Indeed? Talyarkinash had never heard of a Constable with advanced degrees in those sorts of things, but considering the uses to which they were generally put, the woman most likely would have been undercover. Or recruited as a cop later. Or the Constabulary had a secret university where only cops were trained. She made a note to inquire at some point.
Talyarkinash had spent the last decade in her lab ignoring the outside world, getting filthy, stinking rich. Some of it was still hidden away, in places that might not have been discovered yet. Cops like Grodray had already taken the rest of her life apart and confiscated most of her ill-gotten gains.
Fitzroy rose and held out a hand.
“Dr. Liamssen,” she said in a pleasant, alto voice.
“Dr. Fitzroy,” Talyarkinash replied, shaking the hand.
The woman was almost as tall as Grodray, standing. Talyarkinash willed herself to stillness, expecting the woman to show off her strength by squeezing, but she didn’t.
“Please, be seated,” Grodray said, putting deed to word.
Talyarkinash found that they had given her a seat that could telescope up enough to make the Vanir-height table comfortable, as long as she didn’t mind her feet swinging in the air.
Fitzroy’s eyes bored into her as Talyarkinash watched.
“I have studied your work extensively, Dr. Liamssen,” the woman cop began suddenly. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh.”
The tone was nice enough, but Talyarkinash had a feeling that there were layers of cop ugliness concealed underneath. How long had they been trying to pin something on her and failing? How many of her former patients had they found? Or only suspected?
So many of her files had been carefully hidden away and encrypted, but that was before she became a ward of the state and turned them and the decryption key over to Grodray.
Which only made it funnier, since the crime that finally got her taken down might be the most honest thing she had ever done.
“You have me at a disadvantage, then,” Talyarkinash replied. “How may I be of service?”
“I would like to talk about Gareth Dankworth,” the older cop began. “And then the one known these days as Maximus.”
Talyarkinash nodded. As she suspected when she opened the door. She was the expert right now, but the Accord of Souls, and very specifically the Constabulary, needed more experts on humans.
It was entirely possible that they would never cram that djinn back into the bottle, three wishes or not.
“You’ve reviewed my report on Gareth?” she asked carefully. “Both the baseline values and the upgrades?”
“I have,” Fitzroy replied. “But those were written for the lay officer. The men and women who do not have a deep understanding of species genetics. Jackeith Grodray, for example.”
Talyarkinash nodded again. Entirely accurate, as that was exactly what he had asked her to produce.
“You wish to understand the implications of the baseline?” Talyarkinash hazarded a guess.
“I do,” the woman said. “Unlike most of the Constabulary, I have studied humans in great detail, something that brought me out of retirement six months ago when it was feared that a human had escaped into the Accord of Souls. Before anyone knew the truth.”
“That one Marc Sarzynski, AKA Maximus, was born a human on Earth, and illegally transported to Zathus,” Talyarkinash acknowledged. “Before being illegally upgraded by myself and the two Yuudixtl scientists known as Morty and Xiomber, no known last names. How well do you understand humans?”
“At one point, research was done to determine if the Accord of Souls should send an agent to Earth to introduce a virus that would completely eliminate the species while not destroying other life forms,” Fitzroy answered in a calm, bland voice.
Talyarkinash gasped and felt her blood drain to her stomach. Wipe out humans? Just like that?
But it also made a cruel sense. They were not part of the Accord of Souls. They were not part of the psionic collective, not bound by non-violence. Such a thing was monstrous, but at the same time logical. And practical, if humans were that dangerous a species.
“And you did the research?” Talyarkinash guessed.
“I did,” Fitzroy smiled grimly.
Talyarkinash turned to Grodray with an angry face.
“I am never going to see the light of day again, am I?” she hissed. “I know too much to even see the inside of a prison cell, if you decided you no longer needed me?”
“On the contrary, Talyarkinash Liamssen,” Grodray smiled back grimly, still nodding in acknowledgement. “While that was exactly the case five weeks ago, I have had agents paying close attention to your every word and action since then. You are never without some level of surveillance. And you never will be. Make no mistake there. Yes, you know too much. But you have also thrown yourself whole-heartedly into trying to undo the mistakes you had made. Into making Gareth into the monster he became, because you and the other two believed that it might be the only way to save the Accord from utter destruction. You have provided the records we needed to arrest more than fifty prominent criminals that you had previously modified to let them escape justice. Those factors also weigh in your favor.”
Huh.
“Knowledge is dangerous, Dr. Liamssen,” Fitzroy spoke up. “But heart and soul matter. Gareth Dankworth has proven himself to be even more willing than you to face whatever consequences arise, whatever sacrifices he must make. That has impressed even the most surly agents, such as myself.”
Talyarkinash kept her eyes on Grodray, aiming her sensitive nose at the messages he was giving off, even unconsciously.
“So I’m not to be just drained like a lemon and tossed onto the ash heap of history?” Talyarkinash snarked.
“According to my cohort,” Grodray gestured to Fitzroy, “you might be the single most capable geneticist in the Accord of Souls right now. It would be the utter heights of folly not to take advantage of those skills. We have Gareth on our side. They have a rogue in Marc Sarzynski. Dalton Fitzroy is here because we may need more.”
“More?”
“How much more capability could we engineer into Gareth?” Fitzroy asked in a serious, scholarly voice. “Should we consider recruiting a second Sky Force officer?”
Talyarkinash laughed before she could smother it or cover her mouth.
“If you have studied baseline humans, how would you rank Gareth Dankworth on their scale?” Talyarkinash asked the older woman.
“In the top one percent physically.” Fitzroy replied. “In the top four percent mentally. I’ve actually been able to study his records from Earth Force, to compare them to his current form.”
“How?” Talyarkinash gasped. “No. Don’t tell me. It’s obvious you must have spies and systems in place, if you need to keep this close of a track on them. Gareth was using fourteen percent of his genetic capabilities as a human, the moment before I hit him with the six transformation virus injections. Marc Sarzynski, according to Gareth, was so close to him in all ways as to be identical, save for hair color and ethical standards.”
“Fourteen?” It was Grodray’s turn to gasp. “Where did you take him to?”
“Roughly thirty-one percent,” Talyarkinash replied. “I haven’t been given access to the quality of lab I had at home, or my full notes, to nail it down closer than that. Gareth is now the strongest, fastest, and toughest Vanir you will probably ever meet, excepting only Sarzynski. Both are in the top one hundred for intelligence, but Maximus has an edge there because I purposefully kept Gareth on this side of a line that frequently risks significant mental instability in humans.”
“What about the dragon?” Fitzroy asked, leaning forward and staring intently.
“Gareth’s idea,” she admitted. “He wanted something that apparently instills fear in humans, and would probably do the same in the Accord of Souls. He wanted a symbol. So the transformation makes him hexapodal and grants him scales as a layer of dermal armor. The costume I built for him uses his own DNA as a signature, so that it will become part of the transformation and undo later.”
“He can fly and breath fire,” Fitzroy noted. “What are the limitations there?”
“I don’t know,” Talyarkinash admitted with an honest shrug.
“Why not?” Grodray leaned into the conversation. “How is that possible?”
“Gareth’s abilities tap into a vast, unconscious pool of human psionic energy,” Talyarkinash said. “I gave him the power to reshape himself as he needed, but I can no more explain how it works than you could describe blue to a man born blind, Constable. She might be a better expert there.”
“Fitzroy?”
It was Talyarkinash’s turn to sit back and watch. And it was fascinating, watching the woman pick and choose her words carefully.
“I suspect Liamssen speaks the bald truth, Jack,” she said.
Talyarkinash had never heard the man called by the diminutive of his first name, which told her how close these two must have worked in the past. Teacher and pupil?
“Gareth once told me his limitations might be his imagination,” Talyarkinash offered. It was like tossing gasoline onto a fire, to watch the two of them flinch.
“And Maximus?” Grodray asked.
“The same,” she concluded. “Except that all I did was modify him into a top of the line Vanir physically. Morty and Xiomber did the mental work, so you’ll have to ask, if you can locate them. I went well beyond the basics with Gareth. There’s no reason another geneticist worth her egg couldn’t do the same.”
Grodray reached out a hand and opened the forgotten files, flipping through it until he found the page he wanted.
“Both you and Gareth have referred to the form as a Star Dragon,” Grodray asked carefully. “What does that mean?”
“I used his terminology, Grodray,” Talyarkinash replied. “But the basic form of the dragon could survive in space, at least as long as he could hold his breath, which we have not tested extensively. And fly there, if I understand things correctly. We haven’t yet tested that either.”
“Fly? In space?” Fitzroy asked. “How?”
“Again, the power is psionic, and not physical,” Talyarkinash said. “Those wings could not lift his mass, nor carry it to those speeds, using simply physics. He does it, himself.”
“And we have not tested it?” Grodray probed.
“We have not,” she smiled. “He and I have been in custody since the moment his powers manifested.”
“Huh,” was all the man said.
Abruptly, he folded up his notes, gathered the folders in his hand, and stood.
“I will leave you two to talk, then,” he said. “You’ll both nerd out so quickly that I would become lost, but I look forward to talking to both of you tomorrow and learning your conclusions.”
He left with a nod and Talyarkinash found herself alone with the older cop. This woman was still at least as dangerous right now as Eveth Baker had ever been on her best day, even as old as she was.
But Talyarkinash was here to save the galaxy, as weird as that would have seemed to her six months ago.
“What would you like to know?” she asked the woman.
Haberdasher
Gareth recognized the type of room, but this wasn’t the same one he had visited with Morty and Xiomber. That had been a tower on the other side of town, if he remembered the layout of the streets correctly. It had all been culture shock at the time, and then meeting Keelee and getting tasted by a Grace for the first time.
He still shivered at that memory. Grace were weird, with tentacles instead of hair and vertically-slitted eyes, like a Nari, but otherwise could pass as a human, if they wore a hood.
But those tentacles…
What must it be like to be able to smell, taste, and touch with dozens of acutely-sensitive fingers at the same time? No wonder they all seemed to grow up to be artists, to live in a world that rich with sensory input.
Gareth had followed Baker into the room. It was big. Twenty meters on a side, with five meter ceilings, which was rare, even for Vanir offices. Two sofas on one side. A triple-mirror on the other.
This only differed from Jorghen’s shop in that there was an desk with a computer console making the third point of a triangle. And a young Grace officer operating it. He looked up with a smile as they entered.
“Constable Baker,” he nodded. “What can I do for you today?”
“Explorer Dankworth needs to go undercover, here in Londra,” she said, gesturing for Gareth to walk closer to the man. “I need him to look like a mid-range punk, capable of fitting in with a party crowd while still looking like a tough guy. He’ll be armed, so put an ankle holster into the mix.”
“Fop or grinder?” the man asked, losing Gareth in the process. “Londra’s nightlife is running down those two paths, this year. By next year, historical reenactments will be the rage, according to the fashion designers I’m in touch with.”
Baker surprised Gareth by turning to study him, green eyes squinted in appraisal.
“Let’s go grinder, right now,” she replied. “But keep his measurements in the system in case we need to kick him out a second outfit on the fly.”
“Will do,” the Grace officer said. “Explorer, if you could move to the scanners?”
Gareth complied. Unlike Joghen’s system, this one didn’t have the light at the top that apparently looked inside his brain.
Gareth stopped and turned to the officer.
“Last time, there was a light,” he said, rapping on the top of the center mirror. “Right here.”
“You’ve done this before?” Baker was suddenly standing right there. “Been hard scanned for a new outfit? Where?”
“Here in Londra,” Gareth said. “When we passed through Orgoth Vortai on the way to Hurquar. I thought I included that in my report?”
“You did,” she nodded. “But I didn’t realize that it had brain-scanned you fully.”
“Is that a problem?” Gareth asked. “He pulled the outfit I wanted out of my subconscious.”
“Do you remember the name of the place?” she pressed. “The name of the tailor?”
“Jorghen,” Gareth said. “Last name unknown. Never saw him, as his console was in a different room and we talked over the house comm. Tower somewhere on the south side of town.”
“Interesting,” she said, reaching for her comm. “You get done and I’ll talk to Grodray. Somebody might need to have a chat with this tailor.”
Gareth nodded, a little lost, and turned back to the mirrors. He stood perfectly still as the other agent worked his controls, until there was an image of Gareth in all three screens. Instead of steel-blue, he was wearing mostly black, highlighted with emerald green.
Black, shiny, leather boots came up almost to his knees, done with green laces. Knickerbocker shorts met them in the middle over black socks, the pants baggy but not jodhpurs in cut. These used a black and green tartan pattern with a little gold thrown in. Looking close, the fabric appeared to be a really nice wool, like a Scottish Laird might have worn.
The jacket was a blazer, sort of, except it had poofy patch pockets attached to the front instead of them being inside slits. Three buttons covered the front with a narrow lapel, but only the middle button was hooked. Instead of a dress shirt with a tie, he was wearing a black, knit pullover that tucked into the pants behind a brown, leather belt.
“Where’s the holster go?” Baker asked abruptly, bringing Gareth back to the job at hand.
“Tucked into the bottom of the shorts,” the Grace replied. “Accessible via the clasp that hold the knee hitch closed and generally concealed by the pleat and gather on the thighs. Are you right handed or left, Dankworth?”
“Right,” he said, watching the Grace type something into the keyboard.
Gareth stopped himself from speaking. If this was a grinder, what must a fop look like? He had been expecting leather with chrome spikes, or something equally outrageous. This was almost something he could take golfing, if he could get the man to add threads for spikes to the bottom of the boots.
And he looked good.
But the best part was the new beret. It was huge, almost a tam-o-shanter in size, done in a coarse, black wool, with a gold medallion on the left side and a pair of feathers poking up that looked like they came from Stellar’s Jays, bright, fierce blue.
“You like?” Baker asked, suddenly standing right next to him.
“I do,” Gareth replied honestly. “Rugged but distinguished. I could wear that outfit many places without being self-conscious.”
“Good,” she smiled wickedly. “Because you’re going to be bait.”
Gareth suppressed a shudder at the way her voice sounded.
But who ever asked the worm how he felt?
On The Run
“Thoughts?” Morty asked as the auto-taxi deposited them on the sidewalk and bounced back into the sky.
“We stay away from any spot where we took Gareth,” Xiomber said. “Past that, we need a roof and I’ve got the munchies.”
Morty nodded. Jorghen hadn’t been his favorite tailor in Londra, but he had needed to keep Gareth’s scent away from the woman who normally dressed him and his brother. He could imagine what it would have been like introducing her to Gareth.
And he would miss his favorite tea house, but the poor girl who had waited on them had probably been utterly traumatized by the time the cops got done with her. Seeing them again would likely bring it all back in a screaming flash that would end up with he and his egg-brother under arrest.
“Right,” Morty said, turning right and heading east down the street. Downtown Londra was commercial, but there were all sorts of places on the east end that got deep into the Bohemian side of things. Just the place for a couple of renegade physicists to hide.
A bus dropped them at the edge of a park. The weather was passable nice today. Just warm enough that people were outside, but not warm enough to encourage the kinds of nude debauchery Morty had seen around here in the middle of summer.
Still, his favorite hot dog stand was doing a brisk business. He got five, figuring Xiomber would stop at two, like he normally did, and they’d have to hit the pastry shop on the far side of the park afterwards, as always. The coffee was bitter dark, but Stanz didn’t like tea and Morty didn’t want to stand in line for any of the other shops or stands.
They ended up not far from the water fountain, leaned back against a couple of rocks in a bushy area with a good view of the ball fields and generally out of sight. The fountain was off and the fields were abandoned right now, but both would change within a week or three.
They ate in silence, watching the few students studying and a couple of young mothers with strollers, but the park was amazingly empty. Just the way Morty liked it. So much harder for someone to sneak up on them.
Morty checked his watch as a private sedan landed clear across the way. Omerlon’s people might be cut-rate punks, but they did understand punctuality. Three people piled out, two Grace and a Warreth, and started across the field, leaving the vehicle and the driver over in the parking lot.
From their seats, it would be almost impossible for the guys coming to spot them, which was how Morty preferred it. Smuggling themselves across the galaxy was enough of a pain in the tail. Trying to get guns from a reputable fence at the same time was too much.
Plus, Omerlon didn’t have any reason to hate them, as far as Morty knew. Nobody outside Sarzynski’s gang even knew the new boss had been human once, not counting the cops, let alone knew that he and his egg-brother had been responsible for it. Better for everyone to keep it that way.
Nope, hopefully this was just a job interview, and they could settle in and do nice, simple, criminal things for the folks around here for a while, at least until he or Xiomber figured out a way to turn themselves into the Constables, or somebody actually managed to take Maximus down and they might be safe.
That happened, and Morty could see retiring to a nice desert somewhere, living off the ill-gotten gains of a disreputable life of crime without having to look over his shoulder constantly for assassins.
The two Grace thugs pulled up short and took up a spot off to one side. Visible, but not close enough to listen. The Warreth moved to the edge of the fountain and sat.
Morty turned to Xiomber.
“Last chance to change your mind,” he said.
“Oh, hell no it isn’t,” Xiomber chirped. “I got lots of chances to sell your stupid ass down the line and set myself up as a king.”
Morty smiled.
“You aren’t rich enough to buy the right babes, Xiomber,” he sneered merrily. “Best you could do it rent them by the hour.”
“And they’ll still charge me half what they would you,” Xiomber countered. “Let’s do this. The dogs were good, but I want a turnover now.”
Morty shrugged and rose. He emerged from the bushes first, with Xiomber close behind. Like the Warreth, they were wearing light jackets and heavy dungarees today, but everyone kept hands in the open, like polite thugs meeting in public.
“You Xiomber?” the Warreth asked as they got to speaking distance.
“Nope. Morty,” he said, pointing over his shoulder. “That’s Xiomber. You Danzeekar?”
“Correct,” the Warreth replied.
The two Grace appeared to relax a little, turning each a little sideways to make sure nobody else suddenly decided to join this shindig, like, say, cops. Or assassins.
Morty had no doubts that all three were armed, but that was just part of the game these days.
He walked close enough to talk, but didn’t feel like climbing up on the bench.
“So we’re out of work and looking,” Morty said.
“That’s the message I got,” Danzeekar replied. “Why is that?”
“Because Maximus is nuts and getting worse,” Morty snapped. “Turning into a killer. Smart money’s getting out now, while all the parts are still attached.”
“So, free agents?” the Warreth asked haughtily.
“It’s you or the cops, pretty boy,” Morty sneered. “Nobody else has enough moxie to keep us safe from assassins. You need a couple of high-end physicists in the organization?”
“Rumors say that you two also do genetic work,” the birdman observed in a neutral voice. “That true?”
“Yup,” Morty smiled. “We did some of the upgrades on Maximus, along with Talyarkinash Liamssen.”
“What kinds of upgrades?”
The beak was pointed this way now. Morty smiled as the headcrest popped up to full extension. He had the guy’s attention and interest, finally. Dumb-ass punk.
“That’s above your pay grade, pal,” Morty said. “And sure as hell not something to talk about in the middle of a park in the middle of the day, capiche?”
“So you want to come in from the cold?” Danzeekar said. “Just like that?”
“We got information your boss will find interesting,” Morty said. “Plus our skills and experience. You make us a good offer on salary and benefits, and we can do a deal. You empowered to negotiate at that level, or should we talk to the big guy?”
Morty held his breath while the Warreth considered. They really didn’t have a lot of leverage, but Omerlon’s folks wouldn’t know how hard he was bluffing.
Hopefully.
And wouldn’t call his bluff, either, because most of this was bluff.
“You got bonafides?” the man asked.
Bingo.
Morty nearly laughed out loud. Pretty boy was just a messenger, sure, but high enough ranking to dicker. Bonafides were secrets presented in good faith. That first taste of the cake before you bought the rest.
“Yeah,” Morty said as he stuffed his hands into his front pockets. “We upgraded Maximus to a full genius intelligence level as part of the other things we did to him. Liamssen wasn’t involved in that part.”
“How the hell did you do that?” Danzeekar was shocked. “He’s Vanir. They’re already about as fixed as you can get.”
Morty just smiled. Kinda rocked back and forth with his hands in his front pockets. Not quite mocking the guy.
“Oh, and the only other person who knows any of what we did?” he continued. “Talyarkinash Liamssen? She’s in Constabulary custody, and has been for several weeks. I imagine, from my own sources, that she’s spilled everything she knows. You saw how fast Hurquar has been dismantled in the last month, right? Wanna talk yet?”
“Yeah,” the Warreth’s headcrest bobbed three times. “You got a number we can reach you? Boss will want a sit-down after I talk to him.”
“Nope,” Morty said. “You leave a message with Stanz, the hot dog vendor. He’s an old comrade of ours. I’ll check in with him later and see where you’d like to meet. Dinner at an expensive joint, reasonably public, would do nicely.”
Morty turned and walked back into the bushes. Xiomber was kinda crab-walking, to keep an eye on the Grace, but they made it to cover.
There was a little creek tucked in down there. Morty led his partner to it and skittered along the shore as fast as his stubby legs would allow.
When they emerged from the park ten minutes later, that sedan was gone, so Morty picked a side street with some traffic and headed north, Xiomber walking about forty meters behind so they didn’t appear to be together, to a watcher looking for a pair of Yuudixtl males.
They settled into the pastry shop for turnovers and more coffee. Better, but still not tea.
“Think they’ll go for it?” Xiomber asked around a mouthful of blueberry jam threatening to run down his front.
“Hope so,” Morty replied. “They really are our last chance. After that, we either have to go straight, or go to the cops.”
Lifeblood of the Grace
Gareth closed the book and placed it atop a pile of three others on the sidetable next to his comfy reading chair. Two days and four books on the topic wasn’t going to make him an expert on art, but he could at least have a reasonable conversation at the event without looking like a complete fool.
Plus Grodray had brought in an older man, a Grace of some note as an art historian, to prep him for tonight. Apparently, the older a Grace got, the longer their tentacles grew, so he must have been ancient, since some of his had come down to nearly his waist when they hung still.
And he knew everyone that was going to be at the show. This was Orgoth Vortai, so that would be critical. Gareth wasn’t native to the planet, but even he had been impressed. The Accord Ball was the social event of the season, and everyone who was anyone on the planet had been trying to get tickets to attend.
It was a fundraiser, so the major players either bought seats, or an entire table, for astronomical sums that supported the Accord Hall of Arts, the gravitational center of Grace culture. Lesser players were admitted as far as the front hall, where everyone could watch the beautiful people arrive, and then they were allowed into the hall itself after dinner, where they could mingle.
Rumor had it that the deals done every year at this event represented a serious percentage of the planetary output. At least in total cash.
How the Constabulary had gotten three tickets, Gareth didn’t know, but obviously, strings had been pulled. Or they had the cash for something like this in their operating budget.
Or they just sent a few officers undercover every year on general principle.
He checked the time on his nightstand and decided he was close enough to ready. A quick look in the mirror hung on the wall to confirm everything, and he stuffed his new pocketcomm into the breast pocket of his blazer. The palm-sized stun pistol was on his thigh, hidden away inside the pant leg. He picked his beret up off the nightstand and went to the door.
He was supposed to wear the beret inside, but that just didn’t fit with how he was raised, so it could wait until he was in the auto-car.
Grodray and Baker were down in the Operations Center when he arrived, chatting with Talyarkinash. Interestingly, while he was in the so-called grinder outfit, undercover, both of them where in their uniforms. Baker had even gone so far as to wear her outer tunic, like she was taking this sort of thing quite seriously.
Both women turned to him when he entered and gave him a critical once-over. Actually, all seven women in sight did the same, but Gareth tried to ignore that fact. And the intense interest and smiles on those faces.
“Beret?” Talyarkinash asked, so Gareth put it on, draping it just right.
“Yes,” she said a moment later. “You’ll do. Quite nicely.”
Gareth blushed at her tone. It was not entirely friendly. Or it was, but not just that. No, he was the center of a lot of attentions, right now, like a beautiful woman who had walked into a room full of sailors who had been to space for too long.
Uncomfortable. Unpleasant turnabout. He would have made a note to say something about that sort of behavior when he got home, but he quashed that thought before it ever took shape.
There was no home. Not anymore. There was the Accord of Souls. And whatever he did to fit in here. For the rest of his life.
Gareth found himself standing at attention, like this was an inspection, so he forced himself to relax. It was an inspection, and he had apparently passed, from the looks, but he wasn’t being graded.
Much.
“We’ll depart first,” Grodray announced simply, coming over to stand close.
He was a tall man, but skinny. Standing next to Gareth just emphasized his own, massive bulk.
Gareth nodded.
“You just smile and make small talk, Gareth,” he said with a friendly grin. “Nobody knows you here except us, so it makes a good way to quietly introduce you to Accord society in a way that doesn’t require a lot of legend-building on your part. You be aloof and mysterious. Talk art as if you’ll be writing all this up for some magazine under a pseudonym later, and everyone will be polite.”
“Then what?” he asked, still a little fuzzy on the overall picture.
“Then we’ll see who nibbles at the bait,” Baker said. “Nobody knows who you are, so you can make a whole range of new connections that can turn into contacts later.”
“Okay,” Gareth agreed. “I get that, but why don’t I have business cards to hand out when they ask? I’m really just supposed to give them my first name and a comm box?”
“It forces them to perk up,” Grodray said. “Makes you a galactic man of mystery, especially as an unknown who could afford a seat at this table, and had the connections to get in. Everyone will want to know who you are. Make them work at it.”
“Okay,” he shrugged. “Never really done undercover work, but I can at least talk art.”
“And on Orgoth Vortai, that is all that matters, Gareth,” Talyarkinash smiled up at him, reaching out a hand to flatten his lapel a little and run her hand down the wool of his blazer. Maybe a little too long. “I can’t wait for you to tell me all the details later.”
“And that’s our cue,” Grodray said. “Your vehicle will arrive in ten minutes, so you should arrive just as the red carpet starts to get interesting. Remember, aloof and mysterious.”
Gareth nodded and watched them head to the door. He had his pocketcomm, his wallet, and his stunner. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t embarrass himself, or the nice man who had walked him so carefully through so much art history.
All he had now was that and those four books of modern art history and biography he had largely memorized.
Hopefully, it would be enough.
The Red Carpet
In one of the books the older gentleman had suggested Gareth read, walking the red carpet was occasionally referred to as “The Pole Dance,” which conjured up images of a scantily-clad woman doing all manner of athletic maneuvers on and with a floor-to-ceiling brass pole on a stage. Similar to burlesque, but far more physical in nature and requiring a great deal more effort to make look effortless.
And a little seedy, when you got right down to it. Tonight’s arrival, too.
The auto-taxi deposited him at the curb behind a massive, hopefully-only-gold-plated limousine that delivered a well-dressed Grace and his barely-covered companion. They walked up the red carpet and were politely accosted at each of several reporter station, with cameras rolling. Famous people. Gareth hadn’t seen either face to be sure, but he had narrowed the options down to about four, all of them important.
He himself emerged to a flash of lights and whistles, but the man holding the vehicle’s door made it clear that he was to simply amble inside, in full view of everyone, but not stop and chat with any of the reporters, unless specifically accosted.
Aloof and mysterious.
And really, freaking self-conscious, but he mustered himself under the gravity of the scene and strode forward in a relaxed manner. He could ignore the various whistles and cat-calls emerging from the dimly-lit crowd behind the barriers and holding up cameras.
Right?
Five reporters, each interviewing someone. Gareth breezed by them at a slow cadence, glancing right and left, but not seeing anything outside his imagination.
Four identical Nari men, dressed almost as silly as the Pope’s Swiss Guard, defended the main hall from the riff-raff. The looks of appraisal sent his way were more along the lines of checking out the guy that had just walked into the wrong bar, to see if anybody really felt like doing anything about it. He had a head and at least one hundred pounds on the any of them, so they smiled.
“Ticket, please?” the closest one asked as Gareth approached.
He pulled the ornate card from an inner pocket and handed it over.
“Gareth?” the man asked in obvious confusion. “No last name?”
“That’s right,” he smiled ambiguously.
Let people fill in their own stories, Baker and Grodray and others had told him, time and again. That was the key to undercover work. Keep it all vague and you don’t have to track your lies later.
“Very good, sir,” the Nari handed the card back and stepped to one side.
And with that, Gareth was in the Great Hall itself.
Because of the Chaa, and their lasting impact on the culture, everything was huge. The building was an eclectic mix of Ionic and Gothic that shouldn’t have worked, but did. White marble flecked and striped with precious metals held up the roof and covered the floor.
The ceiling in here was forty meters at the peak of the low-pitched roof, with colorful banners hanging from everywhere and idly drifting in the breezes generated by open doors and the air conditioning system. The red carpet continued a four-meter-wide path up a flight of twenty, deep stairs. A Vanir could walk them individually, but anyone shorter would take two steps on each.
At the top of the stairs was an impressive bronze bust, fifteen feet tall, of a cyclopean Grace, tentacles in wild disarray and one, angry eyeball scowling out of the middle of his forehead.
Gareth checked the small placard at the bottom as he approached. He had seen pictures of the enormous head, but had never realized how big “The Art Critic” was in real life. Or what a lovely play on words it was, subtly tweaking all the artists in here and their fiercest enemies.
It put a smile on his face as he entered the atrium of the space at the top of the stairs, trying not to ogle the people around him. There were seventeen species represented in the Accord of Souls, and all of them appeared to be present tonight, in an array of outfits that left him too stunned to even comprehend, let alone describe.
Except there was a lot of skin visible, on both male and female, as well as fur, scales, and bark, depending on the direction he turned. Gareth concentrated on keeping his mouth from falling open, and headed in the direction of the open bar on the side wall.
He wasn’t there to be noticed, unlike many of the people around him. If pressed, he could only name on sight perhaps two dozen, at best, of the three hundred or so that would be joining him for dinner. Many would be offended at his ignorance, however unintentional, so he would keep to himself.
The bartender was a tall, skinny, Grace woman. Lanky and over six feet tall, she was probably used to looking down on her patrons. The expression on her face as she turned to her right to serve him was sour.
She stared at the center of his chest for a moment, and then leaned back to see him smiling above her. Her own smile seemed to emerge from behind the dour shell.
“Sir?” she asked, voice turning hopeful, after the gruffness she had sent after the previous victim.
“Red wine,” Gareth said simply. “The house blend is good enough for now.”
Gareth had no way of guessing which of the dozen bottles in front of him he might like, and wasn’t going to more than sip this glass anyway.
She overpoured him anyway and handed the glass up. Gareth took it with a nod.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, turning away before she pursued any conversation.
He did not understand the effect he had on women, but there was no denying it. Gareth knew he was considered attractive, but had never seemed all that impressive, back home.
Or maybe he just never paid any attention? There was only one woman for him, even if he might never see her again.
Gareth took a sip and meandered into the slowly-thickening crowd.
“No, it’s just hideous,” Gareth overheard two Grace, and older man and slightly-younger woman, well-dressed if conservative, discussing a painting that was hanging on a pillar.
Back home, art was something you observed from a safe distance, frequently behind a velvet rope, with the picture itself perhaps protected by a sealed, transparent container against aging.
But this was Orgoth Vortai, and these were the Grace. That was far too pedestrian.
One approached the painting and leaned close enough that a dozen or more head tentacles could touch the picture, absorbing a full-sensory experience of smell, taste, and texture to go along with the light. Many other installations in here included a musical element as well, so all senses would be engaged.
To allow the pitifully-under-sensed (the Grace’s occasional term for the rest of the Accord), there was a small table to one side, near the picture. Sets-of-three shot glasses held a red, an umber, and a green liquid: just a taste of each, with a number indicating the order to consume them.
Gareth stepped to one side of the two Grace, still arguing, and studied the painting itself. The oil appeared to be a land- and sky-scape at sunset, perhaps. Fierce crimsons bled up into salmony-orange and down into violets, but the over-all image was scarlet in nature.
Gareth nodded to himself and emptied a red glass into his mouth first. It held barely enough to give him a taste, but that was the point. Umber followed quickly, and then green.
One held the three in one’s mouth for a moment, swishing them around like a sommelier at a good wine, before swallowing. It was a complicated taste, almost sour at the outset fading down to an earthy sweetness after a few seconds.
“Mm-hmm,” Gareth hummed to himself.
The nearer Grace turned to him.
“Utterly atrocious, am I correct?” he almost demanded.
Gareth checked the image of the artist herself by leaning well forward, just to make sure, before he leaned back and turned to the two critics. They didn’t appear to be man and wife, although they might be of a similar age.
And he had absolutely no idea if the picture was any good. Or bad. Or how a Grace might experience it differently from a Vanir, or an Elohynn, like the one he saw over there.
But it didn’t matter, as the old master had explained to him this morning. Art was art.
Gareth fell back on the best line the man had taught him, for exactly situations like this.
“I like the way she exhausts her reds,” he opined breezily. “Refreshing.”
Both gawked, and then leaned close to taste it again, afraid they had missed something terribly important that a Vanir, no less, had caught.
Gareth giggled privately to himself and departed before he was called on to explain the random remark. As if he could.
Art was art.
He made his way to the next installation, wondering what any of it meant.
Showtime
“Seriously?” Morty demanded. “The Accord Ball? That bastard wants us to hang around outside like paparazzi for him, and he’ll mingle with us after dinner? Screw that shit.”
Xiomber shrugged. He handed the letter over to Morty and took a step back. Likely moving out of range before he got an angry fist to the snout.
Morty controlled his temper and read the note. Yes, that was exactly what it said. He and his egg-brother had tickets to the after party, while Omerlon would be at the banquet itself, being seen and famous.
“Hey,” Xiomber said to get his attention. “There’s another card in here. It’s for a tailor who owes the man a favor. We’re supposed to call him and get fitted for something nice, on Omerlon’s dime.”
Morty found that at least mollifying. Power, showing itself off. Omerlon was one of the power players on this planet. He was making that point, aggravating as it was.
But it he was willing to throw in a new suit as an enticement, Morty was willing to be enticed. He had worn nothing but grungy jeans and T-shirts for so long he might not even own anything nice enough for a public event like this. So even if they didn’t end up getting a job offer they liked, they’d come out ahead.
Not that he’d be able to wear it in prison, but at that point, maybe something else would come up.
“Fine,” Morty groused. “Anybody we know?”
“Nope,” Xiomber said helpfully. “Want me to look him up?”
“Yes, please,” he said. “Don’t want to end up looking like a clown here.”
“More like a clown?” Xiomber asked serenely.
Morty growled at the Yuudixtl. Xiomber laughed and pulled out a pad, typing furiously with one hand.
“Let’s see,” Xiomber said after a few moments. “Shit’s gone really weird, this season, with an emphasis on flesh and glitter, if I read the guy’s brochure correctly.”
“We’re scientists,” Morty reminded his egg-brother. “We’re supposed to look like nerds. Dark and severe would be my preference.”
“Yeah, you ain’t got the gams to pull off an outfit like this,” Xiomber turned the screen to show him something a self-respecting Nari woman might hesitate to wear to the beach, let alone a ball. “We doing this?”
“Make the call and set us up an appointment,” Morty groused some more. “I’ll find us a place close for dinner reservations. Might as well try and make this stupid charade work.”
Seriously? They wanted a quiet, sit-down kind of meeting to talk turkey with Omerlon, and the man wanted a spectacle.
Were all the criminals these days turning into congenital idiots?
Dinner
“Gareth?” the Borren woman seated on his left asked as she turned away from a conversation on her other side. “That’s it? No last name.”
“More mysterious that way,” he offered, turning away from the overweight, middle-aged Vanir guy on his right that had wanted to talk about investing in art futures.
Whatever that was.
“I see,” the woman leaned a little closer.
Borren were even taller than Vanir, so it made sense that they would be seated at the same table, itself a foot taller than normal. And Gareth had only seen a few of her type, and only at a distance, and not actually talked to one, so he couldn’t tell her age at a glance.
She wore a headpiece in turquoise that sat on her bald skull like an ancient Chinese temple, as much as he could find words to compare it, looking at her. The species was apparently hairless, with spots bigger than freckles on their pate, as well as interesting color patterns like a giraffe trailing down all the parts of her shoulders, chest, and stomach that were naked flesh.
Which was most of them.
Twin ridges of bone emerged from the sides of the large, flat nose and flared away over the eyes, providing shadows that looked rather like eyebrows. Her eyes were simply huge, at least twice the size of Gareth’s, with the points at the inner bottom and outer top corners of an invisible square.
She wore a dress that seemed to cover her back and encase the long, giraffe-like neck, covering only the tops of her shoulders and her arms down to the wrists. White, flexible, plastic sheets had been wrapped around her thorax like an open-fronted corset, resting on her hip bones and coming up to more or less cover her breasts from the sides.
More or less.
The fleshy top of her belly button was pierced, with a ruby pendant dangling in the hole. And if he was understanding the physics involved, he had to guess that her nipples were pierced as well, connected by a silver or platinum chain, hidden by the open-front corset device, connecting them. Not a question that he sought to answer, thank you kindly.
Gareth cleared his throat, sipped his wine, and concentrated on her face. It was weird, but looking up kept him from looking down. The way she leaned towards him and seemed to flex her long torso didn’t help his state of mind.
“And what do you do, Gareth-with-no-name?” she purred warmly.
Gareth fell back as hard as he could on the training and books. Those had been for this question, but the role-play he had done to get ready had been with fully-clothed agents, many of them men.
This was…
“I’m a writer,” he offered, as blandly as he could. “Mostly magazine work.”
“Anything I’d know?” her gravity seemed to be off, or her balance. She kept easing closer, like a tide coming in.
“All written under a pen name,” he tried to relax. “Fewer enemies that way.”
“You must have friends, to get this invitation,” she smiled easily with soft, blue lips.
“Favors for important people,” Gareth suggested. “And I’ll write this all up tomorrow.”
“And when will it be in print?” she was almost breathing on him now. It was like dating that volleyball player in junior high school, when she had been almost a head taller than him, too.
“Who’s to say,” Gareth shrugged, using that as an opportunity to eke out a little more distance.
If he wasn’t careful, she’d be in his lap very shortly.
Not what Constable Baker had planned for him tonight.
Hopefully.
The steward rescued him, delivering a mixed salad and refreshing the bread bowl. Another one filled water and took drink orders.
Gareth had no idea what the salad was. And didn’t really care. The colors were probably fake anyway, or they grew pink carrots here. Didn’t matter. He used the fork in one hand and a hunk of bread in the other to defend his turf like the Russians at Moscow facing the invaders. Any of them.
The woman seemed more bemused than insulted. The man on Gareth’s other side was still bending the ear of the man on his far side about investment opportunities and tax breaks.
All conversation seemed, of universal volition, to subside for an hour, replaced by the tinkling of knives and folks on plates and glasses being set down loud enough to clunk. Salad was followed by a cold soup that would have been proudly served by any Ukrainian café in the solar system.
Gareth hadn’t ordered the main course. Apparently, that had been handled by whoever got him the invitation. They had selected the beef. He hoped it was beef. Now was not the time to ask. Nor was this the place. The sauce was lavender. And rather sweet/sour in the way of certain Chinese dishes he had encountered in his travels.
Gareth pretended he had a boneless ribeye in a redwine reduction, and attacked it with gusto. And it was close enough, with the occasional sip of red wine and some buttered bread in between bites.
When the stewards removed his plate and filled his coffee cup, Gareth found the woman on his left suddenly much closer than he remembered her chair being before.
“Diệu Ahn,” she introduced herself. “Since we don’t have last names tonight.”
Gareth shivered, but only inside, he hoped. That sounded like too much of an invitation on her part. Letting her hair down, although she didn’t have any, just exquisite, tiny ears and that huge headpiece.
Gareth lifted the coffee cup like it was a shield, holding his left elbow out in such a way as to hopefully keep her at arm’s length. But then the other patrons began to rise and make their way towards the front of the building, from the auditorium at the back where dinner had been served.
Before he was fully standing, Diệu Ahn had her arm wrapped around his.
“I think you’re one of those fashion writers that always goes by a secret identity at these sorts of things,” she murmured down to him. “That or a secret agent. What do you think, Gareth?”
“Something like that,” he replied evenly. It was even true, more or less.
Just not the parts she was expecting.
“Have you seen the entire hall?” she continued, leading him towards a grand flight of stairs he had ignored earlier, when he had been scouting the people more than the terrain.
These steps were more polished white marble, overlaid with a burgundy carpet that bullnosed at each step.
“I have not,” he replied.
Gareth felt like a dog on a leash, or one with his head out the window, as she politely led him up the stairs. That she was at least seven inches taller or more, depending on the heels below that dress, didn’t help. Everything about her was turquoise and white tonight, except her skin, which was too pink to be alabaster, and those freckles, which might cover her entire body in geometric shapes.
Gareth really, REALLY didn’t want to do any math tonight.
The mezzanine was lovely. Gareth regretted not coming up here earlier. The view was perfect to observe all the beautiful people below, while keeping them at a polite and impersonal distance. He and Diệu Ahn shared the balcony with a number of other folks, some he recognized from dinner, and a large number of photographers making their living. Steward with trays came by, and she snagged them both glasses of what Gareth guessed were champagne, from the color and bubbles.
She giggled as they tickled her nose. It was a pretty, girlish, distracting sound that kept Gareth’s attention wandering to places it had no business going.
Pippa. Only Pippa.
At the far end of the hall, the flood gates had apparently been breached. A wave of species poured into the grand hall from the front, those people with second-class tickets to the after-party.
Dinner had been showy and self-congratulatory, as various awards had been given out while everyone chowed down. Now came the grand event. Everyone coming in with the tides had a camera in one hand. Drones were forbidden indoors tonight, and nobody wanted to miss anything.
Diệu Ahn still had her free hand around his elbow. Gareth watched her set her glass down on the wide, marble balustrade and reach inside her corset, thankfully below her breast instead of across it. She did something and withdrew her hand, reaching towards him.
Gareth nearly flinched. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but his mind kept seeing a giant spider in her hand. His nerves were apparently shot.
Instead, she had pulled a business card from in pocket inside the corset-thingee. Rather like his blazer had pockets inside, but his were empty.
She leaned in close and languidly slid her hand inside his blazer, searching for his pocket for several seconds in the wrong places with a smile and a quiet, coquettish giggle. Finally, she dropped the card and withdrew her hand. Gareth’s breath was short.
“Got something for me?” she purred, twisting her torso around a little to make it obvious where he might put such a thing.
Inwardly, he said a small prayer of thanks to Constable Baker. Even accidentally.
“My, uh, boss actually forbid me from carrying any tonight,” Gareth replied dejectedly, at least he hoped it sounded that way. “Under threat of extreme sanction. And she was serious.”
“She?” Diệu Ahn looked interested in a potential rival to battle.
“Complete and total hardass editor,” Gareth freelanced the relationship. It sounded close enough, from what he had seen of newspapers on the video tube. “If I wasn’t bound under a tight contract, I’d shop my services elsewhere.”
Wrong thing to say. Her eyes perked right up.
“Oh,” Diệu Ahn smiled. “Need a good lawyer to help you break a contract? I have several on staff.”
Gareth blinked and remembered his manners.
“It dawns on me that we’ve only talked about my life tonight,” he tried to deflect the statuesque woman. “What do you do, Diệu Ahn?”
She grabbed her glass and sipped, telegraphing a shrug with her entire body in such a way that Gareth kept losing focus on her eyes.
“I’m an art patron,” she said modestly. “I buy, I sell. I collect things that catch my eye.”
That last in a purr that felt like a bear-trap closing.
“I’ll have to remember to call you next week for an interview,” Gareth suggested.
“Call?” Diệu Ahn smiled. “That, too. Nudge, perhaps?”
Gareth smiled and sipped his wine, hoping that he wasn’t beet red right now.
Pippa.
She seemed to sense some of his discomfort and withdrew her fangs, just a little. She tugged at his arm, turning him to the right, where he could see a new gallery through a narrow archway.
“We should enjoy the art,” Diệu Ahn announced in a quiet, authoritative voice. “Broaden our horizons.”
Gareth nodded and read the name of the space over the door. His heart really wanted to stop beating right now. Just keel over and die, but it refused.
Inter-Species Erotica it read in a lovely, Helvetica font. Small enough to be discrete.
In a Grace museum. The sort of place where art exhibits were expected to be interactive.
Gareth’s eyes refused to dwell on it. He was undercover, making contacts which he hoped would lead him to useful places in the underworld. Baker and Grodray had them. His job was start building his own network.
However unsavory that task might turn out to be.
Instead, his focus drifted back to the crowd below. The mad rush was over and people were settling into clusters and currents.
Gareth stopped dead, dragging Diệu Ahn to a halt as well.
“Hey,” he muttered absently.
“What is it, Gareth?” she asked, leaning close and rubbing herself against his side.
“I know those guys,” he said aloud.
Down in the main hall. Morty looked up and locked eyes with him. The Yuudixtl said something that was covered by the noise in the auditorium, but that was okay. Gareth was pretty sure it would have gotten the lizardman’s mouth washed out with soap, were either of their mothers here right now.
Morty turned and nudged Xiomber, the two them talking to a fat Elohynn with a couple of obvious bodyguards.
The frozen tableau held for a moment, and then the two Yuudixtl bolted.
The Chase
“Hey, you two,” Gareth yelled, but Morty and Xiomber weren’t having any of it.
He was still tangled up with Diệu Ahn, so he took the moment to set the wine glass down and smile up at her.
“Fashion writer with a secretive past?” he said quickly. “Also secret agent. Those two are bad guys. My most profuse apologies, but I must give chase now,”
She leaned in and quickly kissed him on the lips before he could react.
“Call me,” she said, stepping back and letting go of his arm.
Gareth threw caution to the wind and grabbed her to return the quick kiss, only the third woman he had ever done that to, and the second one taller than him.
He turned and spotted the two runners. They were making their way to the front door, with the fat Elohynn lumbering along in their wake. Given the nature of things, Gareth assumed another bad guy with a guilty conscience.
Considering what Morty and Xiomber did, he wondered if the man was another crime boss, like Marc. One way to find out.
The stairs were too flat and wide to take them more than two at a time, and there were people on them that were too fragile for him to brush against. Especially with a forty foot drop off the side.
He ran anyway, weaving like a wingback that had made it through the defensive line and was facing open field and a goal line. He had always been athletic and a jock. As a Vanir, he was even better than he had been then, moving like a ballerina.
At the bottom of the stairs, two of the fat person’s bodyguards had decided to fight a rear-guard action of some sort. One was a Vanir like him. The other a burly Grace. Gareth smiled.
The Accord of Souls was a peaceful place, by design. Team sports were all about skill and athleticism, but they had nothing like rugby or American football.
Too violent.
Too bad.
Neither of the goons had a weapon in hand, so Gareth didn’t bother trying to pull his stunner from his knee. Instead, he transformed on the fly into a halfback, punching a hole in the defensive line for his tailback to streak to glory. He lowered a shoulder and pulled in his right arm close to his body, just like the old days.
The Vanir facing him was awkwardly balanced and had obviously never faced a blocker coming through the line. You had to get under the runner in order to stop him. Gareth had been a defensive end in school, faster and smaller than the monsters in the interior, and taller than the linebackers.
Now he was bigger and faster than any player he had ever faced. And running full tilt. He smashed into the Vanir and bounced the poor man onto his ass while stiff-arming the Grace to the face in a way that would have been good for a fifteen-yard penalty and a stern talking-to from Coach, if the man were around to witness it.
Needs must.
Both villains were down and Gareth was in the backfield, with the safeties still trailing their receivers and their backs to the play. He put on a burst of speed towards the front door and the goal line.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spied Baker and Grodray suddenly wake up to the situation, but he was moving as fast as his upgraded legs could carry him, and not even Eveth Baker could run him down now, as much as she might want to dispute that in other circumstances.
From the top of the entry stairwell, he saw the trio exit through the front door, the glass thrust open hard enough to ring when the metal frame slammed against another door. Neither broke, but that just meant they were reinforced.
And the Elohynn was in the lead now, with the two lizardmen trailing him as fast as those stubby legs could churn.
These steps were so wide that Gareth had to take them individually so he didn’t trip and face-plant going down. It slowed him some, but not enough. He could see a plain van land outside and the trio enter through the back. It wasn’t an auto-car, so there was probably no way that the Constables behind him could override the controls. At best, they would have to call for backup pursuit, which may and may not arrive fast enough to corner them.
Gareth hit the closing door hard enough that it did shatter this time. Or at least spiderweb into a million pieces held in place by a film of clear plastic. The panel van was just taking off and he had only a split second to make a decision.
He jumped onto side of the vehicle by the driver’s door as it leapt into the air, the ground falling away quickly behind him.
Now was when it would probably get ugly.
Paparazzi
Morty had to admit it. He looked good tonight. Purple tights tucked into low, pull-on boots in a black suede. Lavender tunic almost to his knees, with a white belt and lots of showy pockets embroidered in white.
Even if the night was a bust, he could get into the nicest restaurants and parties in this rig. That dude must have really owed Omerlon a big favor. Even Xiomber was presentable, though he looked more like a banker, or a mortician, in severe black pants and blazer over a black shirt and black tie. Seriously, that lizard was a hole in the night, standing next to a supernova of awesome.
It wasn’t Omerlon’s champagne, but the house stuff was still damned good, as the three of them chatted about nothing and sipped. Omerlon was wearing a white toga tonight that made him look like how the Chaa were always portrayed on television. Even down to the purple stripe around the edge.
“Enjoying yourselves, gentlemen?” Omerlon asked, looking like a cat with the best cream in town.
“Indeed,” Xiomber replied with a nod. “Ravishing.”
Morty expected his egg-brother to click his heels together or something. What had come over the boy?
“This is a mark of my control of Orgoth Vortai,” Omerlon swept a hand out and nearly whacked a goon in the face.
Both bodyguards took a step back in unison, so Morty presumed that the man gestured a lot when he spoke. Useful to know.
“We’re convinced,” Xiomber said. “Right now, we’re down to brass tacks. Retirement plans and profit sharing.”
“Is that how Maximus did it?” Omerlon half-sneered and looked half-interested in the information.
“Among other things,” Morty heard Xiomber reply.
Morty’s attention was suddenly riveted onto a figure up on the balcony. Huge, even for a Vanir, if the Borren next to him was a good measure of size. The blond hair was long enough that it would get shaggy soon, and the beard was a pretty good disguise, but Morty had helped Talyarkinash with the basic upgrade designs.
That was Gareth. As a Vanir. Here. At this party.
Looking this way.
Their eyes met. Locked.
“Fardel,” Morty ejaculated before he could contain it.
“What?” Xiomber turned towards him, but Morty nudged him and gestured to the balcony with his chin.
Even Omerlon grew interested enough to glance over his shoulder.
“Oh, shit,” Xiomber muttered under his breath before raising his voice just enough for Omerlon to hear. “We’re blown.”
Morty was gone as soon as Xiomber said the word. If Gareth was here, there would be others.
There. The crazy Vanir cop chick from Hurquar. The other guy was probably her partner, the two them in dress uniforms tonight while Gareth had been in mufti.
Definitely time to skedaddle.
He could hear Xiomber right behind him, those mortician shoes slapping angrily at the marble with every step, while Morty’s boots squeaked.
A heavier tread close behind was Omerlon, trusting their instincts and joining them in flight.
Across the hall and past the giant head of the crazy Grace. Morty cursed whatever damned Grace architect had decided that stairs should slow you down to enjoy the art. Gareth was running after them with Vanir legs, and Morty couldn’t just throw himself forward if he wanted to make it to the bottom without any broken limbs.
And that fat bastard Omerlon cheated. Hit the top of the steps and stuck his wings out sideways to glide to the ground floor while Morty and his egg-brother were only halfway down.
At least he opened the door for them, hard enough that the catch hadn’t swung it back in their faces by the time they got there.
Morty heard the crime boss calling for his car on a comm, so maybe they had a chance to get out of this, if they stayed close to the guy. He had been planning to hit the door and bolt sideways, making the cops pick who to chase down in the darkness, but a personal vehicle just might get away.
The truck landed. It looked like something a plumber might own, minus only the name and comm number on the side, but the back sprang open and the fat angel waddled up the steps inside.
Morty was right on his ass when he cleared the doorway, and Xiomber slammed it shut with all his might as he got in.
“Go.” Morty yelled at the driver, a head visible through a window to the cab.
Omerlon had landed himself in a throne, gasping for air like a grounded whale shark. Morty grabbed Xiomber and pushed him into a pair of seats at the front, backs to the driver and facing the fat man as the engines surged with power.
He took the moment to hook his seatbelt, laughing to himself while Xiomber did the same. They had both picked that up from Gareth, the very man chasing them.
The driver had slammed the throttle to the stops. The whole vehicle seemed to squat for a moment on its haunches, before it leapt into the night sky like a jaguar pouncing on a bird in a tree.
Morty and Xiomber shared a secret grin as Omerlon was nearly dumped on his ass before he managed to grab onto the arms of his seat. The truck was pulling something like two G’s, more or less straight up. Hopefully enough to get some distance before a local cop car could start after them.
After that, it was a matter of getting underground and hiding before the Constables brought in everybody in town down here to chase them.
A thump on the outside hull beside Morty sounded an awful lot like a big Vanir landing on the running boards next to the driver. A moment later, a thump that sounded like a fist hitting the window.
Knowing Omerlon, they were bullet-proof, but the crime boss had only been expecting a normal cop. That sort of thing might not stop Gareth, if Talyarkinash had actually pulled it off.
This was about to get ugly.
“Boss, we got a passenger on the outside,” the driver yelled as the vehicle kept surging upwards into the night sky.
“Dump him off,” Omerlon called back.
“Hang on,” the driver replied.
Morty and Xiomber were already buckled in. Omerlon managed to do the same just in time as the vehicle turned almost fifty degrees to the left.
It was like being on a ride at a carnival.
Another thump on the side of the panel truck. Louder.
Angrier, if Morty had to put a better adjective to it.
Yeah, that sounded like a modified human losing his temper out there.
“Who is this guy?” Omerlon fixed them with a hard stare.
“Constable,” Xiomber offered. “We’ve run into him a few times. Mean SOB. Even worse than Grodray and Baker.”
“And he just happened to recognize you at the Ball?” Omerlon sneered.
Morty just shrugged. No way to explain that without getting himself killed.
Outside the vehicle pitched again. The thumps on the driver’s window got louder.
Suddenly, the glass shattered, letting a ripping wind into the interior of the van.
The vehicle leveled off some, as the driver was suddenly too busy wresting with Gareth to try to shake him loose.
Omerlon reached inside his toga as the noise grew worse. He came out with a pistol and Morty felt all the blood pool in his stomach.
“Since you know the guy, I’ll let you die with him,” Omerlon snarled.
Before Morty could react, Omerlon shot the flight console twice. In a flash, the fat man moved to the rear door, pushed it open and stepped out into the night.
“See you in hell,” trailed back into the cabin with the wind.
The words were quiet, but Morty could still hear them clearly. All the engines had gone silent as the craft slowed to a halt, paused, and began to free-fall.
Relentless
Gareth felt his upgraded muscles strain to hold onto the side of the truck as it pitched over until his back was parallel with the ground. He had a boarding rail in one hand, where the driver could reach up when climbing in, and a running board under his feet.
And about three thousand feet of warm night sky below him.
He managed to swing his right foot loose and get it under the running board, using that and the rail as a pair of anchor points to hold himself up.
Gareth punched the driver’s window with an angry fist, but it bounced off. Safety glass, he presumed.
The truck righted itself for a moment, and then rolled again hard, like an angry gator with fresh prey.
Now he was losing his temper. They could manage to dump him, but Gareth wouldn’t be killed, unlike any other officer in the service. That still made this attempted murder.
He snarled.
One thing Gareth had learned about his new form was the ability to trigger it in pieces, for lack of a better term. He didn’t have to fully transform his body, but could instead just dramatically escalate his strength beyond anything an unmodified Vanir could do. It helped that rage just fueled him right now.
He leaned into a minor transformation, even as the vehicle righted itself a second time. Instead of just punching the glass, the Star Dragon put all his might into annihilating it.
Nothing was capable of resisting that might. And it did not.
Even the most bullet-proof glass wasn’t dragon-proof,
Gareth reached in with a hand that had started to turn scaly and green. The driver grappled with him, trying to do something. Knock him loose, perhaps? Force his hands away from the controls?
Gareth would never know. A raygun suddenly blasted the entire console in front of the driver and the truck’s engines died.
“See you in hell,” a sour voice rang clear in the sudden silence, and then the vehicle’s upward trajectory abruptly slowed as it discovered gravity.
Gareth snarled.
Now, attempted murder of a Constable had moved up to mass murder. At least four people, including himself, Morty, Xiomber, and the driver, plus whoever else might be in back, plus anyone who would be killed when an out-of-control panel van slammed into the ground at terminal velocity.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
Or was there?
Gareth was supposed to keep his powers secret. A surprise weapon to spring on the bad buys at the best time. At least, those that hadn’t already been there, or heard the stories.
But if he did that, innocent people would die tonight. Even criminals who didn’t deserve this end.
Gareth let go of everything but his left hand on the boarding rail and let the rest of the transformation take hold.
Even a Star Dragon couldn’t lift a heavy vehicle like this, but he had to try.
“Mayday,” the dragon’s immensely deep voice called out, hoping that someone was monitoring the channel.
Someone who could help.
“Gareth, this is Baker,” her voice came back instantly. “What’s your situation?”
Gareth felt the truck reach the top of the parabola and pause for a second at its highest point. He shifted around so that he could grab the two front windows with his front paws and hammered his claws into the armored sides of the back. His wings caught the night air and bit as the immense dead weight pulled him towards the planet below.
“Total vehicle failure,” Gareth said precisely. “One Elohynn criminal in flight. At least three others trapped in the vehicle. Can anyone help?”
The strain on his shoulders felt like they would tear loose at any moment. He flapped, but barely made any headway, until he had a thought.
Gareth pushed his entire body backwards, letting the weight of the vehicle shift itself forward. The nose of the truck went down, and Gareth could see better where he was going.
He didn’t have to slam into the ground when it got here, but the others didn’t have that option, and the ground would be here faster than anybody could arrive that might be able to prevent the giant anvil in his grip from smashing itself to pieces on the ground, plus any towers or restaurants that managed to be in the way of falling death.
“Can you make the river?” Baker asked calmly. “Ditch there where we might be able to rescue survivors?”
Might.
It was night, and that water would be dark and cold. The men inside would have seconds to escape, assuming the van survived impacting the water, before they were pulled to the dark, murky bottom.
And from this height, hitting water was going to be like hitting concrete, because there was no way he was going to flatten them out enough to matter in the next thirty seconds.
“Negative,” he said.
Gareth looked other directions. The river was just too far away, and the towers beside it too tall. He’d probably end up slamming into one as he went by, trying to avoid killing people.
He was back to Ethics 101 at school. Do you choose to send the runaway vehicle crashing into a tree to save pedestrians, thereby killing the driver, or do nothing and let the vehicle kill the pedestrians instead?
How do you decide who has to die today?
In some ways, that wasn’t even a thing to discuss. The three inside might have to die, but Gareth would not put anybody else at risk to die, possibly with them, rather than instead.
Blinking lights on the ground caught his eye. The tube station was close. But the entire facility was dark right now. Gareth had learned enough to know that meant there were no ferries currently in orbit overhead.
“Can you contact the station?” Gareth strained to make the words intelligible as he pushed everything he had into his shoulders, trying to turn the massive dead weight to starboard. At the very least, there were open fields in that direction, so he would only kill the two men who had brought him here, and the driver.
Hopefully.
“What station?” Baker asked.
“The tube station,” Gareth roared. “Have them turn on the generators and open me a tube into space. Do it now.”
He took a breath and leaned over to the left.
“Morty, can you hear me?” he called.
“Is that you, kid?” the Yuudixtl physicist called back in a hopeful voice.
“It is,” Gareth replied. “Can you find the emergency oxygen masks?”
Every flying vehicle had to have them, by law, on the presumption that they might go through a wormhole at some point, and all of those were in space. Because the law said emergencies and mistakes happen, you had to be able to survive suddenly losing a vehicle seal and facing vacuum.
This vehicle was turning. Falling in a different direction, perhaps. Not into the heart of the art district, nor the Hall of Arts.
If he could only make it that far before his friends had to die.
“Got ’em, Gareth,” Xiomber’s voice came back. “What are you doing?”
“Put them on now,” Gareth roared in a voice that much of the city below might have heard.
Baker had gone silent on him. Hopefully that meant that she was calling someone over at the tube station, waking them up. Doing something that would prevent a lot of unnecessary deaths tonight.
Gareth strained through the pain. It felt like his wings were being pulled out of their sockets to the point that he might not be able to escape when this thing hit the ground. He would just have to deal with that.
Or watch his friends die. He could always just let go right now and survive with nothing more than bruises and pulled muscles. Three presumed criminals would suffer the ultimate sanction, and they would never again be a threat to the Accord of Souls.
That wasn’t why he had joined Earth Force. Wasn’t what made him an agent of Sky Patrol.
Gareth St. John Dankworth was not a man who surrendered.
He pulled harder. Growled. Metal actually began to deform under his grip as his claws ripped into the steel of the truck’s carcass.
Ten seconds to impact.
Gareth howled in pain and frustration. They hadn’t dreamed big enough, back when they created a Star Dragon. He should have gone for something big enough to lift a tank or a star shuttle off the ground.
Then Morty and Xiomber and the poor driver wouldn’t be about to die from his failures.
Five seconds.
Light.
Nightfall
There is no air in space, Gareth thought to himself as the flash of light ended, replaced by an endless darkness broken by a billion points of light. He was suddenly in freefall and vacuum.
Beneath him, the air in the panel van exploded outwards through the shattered window and the opened back door, a snow storm that ended as abruptly as it had begun.
A pinging began in his right ear in spite of the soundlessness of space. It matched a flashing red light that suddenly reflected off his hide and tail.
Emergency beacon on the truck. Automatic. The vehicle has suffered a failure in space and the onboard systems had triggered their own mayday. His earpiece was picking up the distress beacon, and it was tucked in deep enough that he could feel it click in his bones.
Gareth’s inner eyelids clicked shut and held in moisture, as did his nostrils. He kept his mouth shut and let his own unconscious systems come into play. Talyarkinash had designed the Star Dragon to survive in deep space. He was airtight and insulated against cold, air loss, and radiation for several hours, if his held breath lasted that long.
The men inside the van didn’t have that option. If they were wearing their air masks, they could at least breathe, but vacuum damage and cold would do them in quickly. He needed to do something.
He hadn’t come this far just to lose them now.
Without gravity’s greedy clutches, he could move the panel truck more easily. It was a giant medicine ball in his hands now, rather than a Sisyphean impossibility. He flapped his wings and imagined bringing the vehicle to a stop, since he had nothing in the vicinity against which to measure his speed.
Still, it seemed to work. He let go with rear claws and right hand, and flowed himself around to the open front window. The one he had shattered earlier.
The driver was gone.
For a moment, Gareth panicked, looking every direction in case the man had been blasted into deep space by the sudden decompression, but he was alone in the darkness and silence.
Nothing.
He stuck his head into the window and looked at the rear. Morty and Xiomber, at least, had been back there, and hadn’t gone out the back door either.
Then he saw why.
Inside the rear cabin was a giant bubble. One Grace and two Yuudixtl sat inside, pale white and darkest green, respectively.
Morty waved cheerfully. The driver flinched.
Huh. Emergency lifeboat system. He hadn’t thought about that. Trigger it to inflate and then seal it up around you. Probably up to an hour of air, depending on how many people it had to contain.
“Gareth, this is Baker, can you hear me?” a tinny voice came in his ear.
“I can,” he said.
It was weird, talking without moving his jaw. The bones in his head would carry the sound via induction to the microphone in his ear, with some distortion. No complicated speeches, but basic communication would work.
“Thank you,” he continued. “It worked.”
“What is your status?” she asked, obviously relieved.
“Vehicle dead in high orbit,” Gareth murmured. “Three people in a survival bubble.”
“Okay, stand by,” she said. “We’re trying to find a truck big enough to rescue you at the same time we do your prisoners. Nothing like that here.”
Gareth considered his options. He actually couldn’t remember seeing anything but a transport shuttle capable of holding his twenty-seven-meter-long dragon form, and he couldn’t shift back to his base form without a space suit. Up here, there would be no time to get into one.
He’d be facing the same freezing death he had feared these three men had gotten into.
Then a thought struck him.
“Do you have an auto-car that had can open to space?” he asked.
There was a long pause before her voice returned.
“We do, but what about you?” she asked.
“Rescue them first,” he said. “I have an idea for me.”
“Okay,” Baker said. “Stand by.”
Gareth pulled his head back out the window and stuck a paw in instead, giving them a thumbs-up signal he hoped was universal. His current face wasn’t capable of smiling like a Vanir or a Grace could, and he didn’t have time to teach them.
Instead, he moved around the truck, finding the spots where his rear claws had actually managed to punch holes in the sides in spite of the armor.
Of course, in the Accord of Souls, everything was a beam weapon of some sort, rather than a high-velocity shell, so you needed insulation and thermal barriers, rather than inches of hardened steel plate and ceramics to protect you.
The men inside were trapped by the narrowness of the door. Gareth had no idea how much squeezing and reshaping the bubble could take, trying to pry it out of the back of the vehicle, and it would only take one mistake to kill the three men inside it.
He braced his feet into those holes again, but facing rearwards this time. In space, there is no gravity to hold you down. And no friction to stop you from moving, You are actually in constant freefall, but moving sideways such that it looks like you can never hit ground.
Everything becomes leverage.
Fortunately, Agents of Earth Force Sky Patrol had to be experts in extra-vehicular activities in order to earn their badge. Gareth had lost track of all the times he had needed to move outside a vehicle in deep space, from rescuing a lost puppy to stopping a runaway ship from destroying Shadow Base One, back in the Earth–Moon L2 LaGrange Point.
His dragon form was long enough to clamp onto the top of the truck and hold himself firmly, while also stretching his front to the aft of the craft. The door opened out and was just getting in the way, so that needed to go first.
Or did it?
He relaxed his chest and inspected the metal of the craft more closely. In this form, he could have licked it and gotten almost as good an understanding as a mass spectrometer, but that would waste precious air. Plus he might end up sticking his tongue to a frozen sign post.
He twisted around until he was looking in the rear. Morty and the others had turned to face him from much closer. Apparently, one of them had said something to the driver, because the Grace seemed a little more relaxed than before.
Like maybe he wasn’t expecting a Star Dragon to have him for lunch.
Heh.
Gareth held up a single finger, again hoping it was a universal signal, and pushed the door closed until he felt it latch through his claws.
In space, nobody can hear you laugh. That was good, because this was the single silliest thing he had done since he came to the Accord of Souls seven weeks ago.
He let go.
It stayed where it was.
He flapped lazily until he was lined up with the passenger bottom corner of the truck.
There is no air in space, but he didn’t actually use mechanical lift to do this, according to Talyarkinash Liamssen. It was all in his mind, somehow, a leftover from somewhere, or perhaps a trace of the very godhead that the Chaa had tapped when they moved past physical forms.
Was that why they had uplifted all the other species in the galaxy and left humans alone? Did we have the potential to someday join them on their exotic quest to find God and sit at his feet?
Gareth had always been punctual about Sunday school as a child. And visited Pastor Jacob whenever he had home leave, plus whichever priest was assigned to the base he was at. The religions really didn’t matter that much to Gareth, as long as they believed. As ship’s commander, he had even had to act as priest for his own crews, making special readings every seventh day to help bind them into a greater whole that was Earth Force Sky Patrol.
Gareth blinked in shock. He wondered if this radical idea was something he could ever share with anyone. The Accord of Souls was comprised of species that had been Uplifted by the Chaa and then set into their current form.
Did that mean that nobody but a human had that potential? Did it mean Marc Sarzynski really could achieve godhead if he worked at it hard enough? That Gareth could himself?
Whoa.
Still, not a problem for today. Right now, he needed to save these three men from certain death, and that meant that he needed to get them out of the vehicle safely.
The hatch was closed and latched. He hadn’t seen it move. Everything should be safe enough.
Just to be sure, he started low and away, like a good curveball coming in over the plate.
The Star Dragon had a binary chemical weapon. It didn’t need oxygen, as one of the two chemicals in the mix contained enough. More would help, but he needed controlled destruction today, and not psychological terror.
Gareth opened his mouth just a little. It was almost like that disgusting habit of chewing tobacco and spitting the juice into a cup. He had set down strict rules on any crew he commanded that something like that was not allowed aboard ship, because it could be so messy.
Squeezed his chest slowly and carefully. Aimed his snout and focused the sudden blast of superheated fluid.
And discovered that Newton was right, when he was suddenly tumbling backwards ass over teakettle.
He hadn’t been pushing forward, and had done the equivalent of lighting a rocket engine in his mouth. Hopefully, nobody had a camera pointed this direction.
He flapped a few times and stopped his tumble, just the slightest bit queasy.
Getting closer, the tail of the truck was certainly scorched, but not in a single spot, as he had planned. It looked more like a badly done crème Brule.
Okay, focus on incoming pressure and hold yourself stable this time, dummy.
He moved again to the right spot and focused his will. Another jet of flames.
This time, he flapped his wings, leaning into the heavy wind that was his own personal rocket engine in deep space. He’d need to remember this trick, sometime.
The blowtorch hit the corner of the truck and started it tumbling as well. Slower, but noticeable.
Crap.
Gareth quickly pounced on the vehicle and pulled that damned medicine ball until it felt like it was sitting in space again. The riders probably wouldn’t notice a moderate spin, but he didn’t need them puking on the inside of that emergency bubble and then having to sit in it for an hour or more.
Okay, fine.
Gareth stuck his toes back into the holes he had gouged earlier. Newton was right, and physics were physics. He would just have to do this upside down.
Third try.
He had a better idea of how to flame in space by now. And could bring it down to a fine, cutting blade of plasma. He was pretty sure the door was insulated, and probably a good chunk of the rear and sides, but the welds where the vehicle had been assembled would still be vulnerable.
It was just going to take patience.
Fine.
Up the sides, and he could see the welds weaken. He didn’t want to actually penetrate the interior, because his breath weapon was too dangerous to the soft tissue of the emergency bubble.
No, this was just to soften them up a little.
"What are you doing?” Baker’s voice came across the radio.
It sounded like she was watching him.
Gareth stopped flaming and looked up. Sure enough, an auto-car hung in space about thirty meters away. Almost close enough that he could touch both at the same time if he stretched, but far enough distant to stay out of his way.
The aft airlock hatch was open and she was standing in it, wearing a light EVA suit and clamped to the interior with a secondary line. Good professionalism on her part.
He wondered who was driving, if anyone, and what they though to see a dragon in space.
“Watch,” Gareth smiled.
He returned to his work. Across the top. Down the driver’s side. Back across the bottom.
“Could you move up and to my starboard?” Gareth asked.
“Stand by,” she said.
Silence, so she was probably on a different channel, talking to the car or the driver.
Gareth puffed a few places that looked a little stronger than the rest, and then delicately opened the door. He leaned his head in and scanned as much as he could with his peripheral vision.
So far, so good. Probably would have set things on fire if they were down on the surface, but there was no air to burn up here.
Morty and Xiomber looked quite thrilled at the spectacle. The Grace had turned almost green by now. Probably not the day he envisioned when he got out of bed.
Baker’s car had moved off and out of the way. Physics was physics, and this was probably going to be impressive as hell when she replayed the video later for Grodray and whoever else was cleared for this level of secrecy.
Okay, now to get crazy.
Strength, like flight, was a matter of mind. Or mind over matter. Or something. He hadn’t been strong enough to lift this truck when it was falling, but maybe Talyarkinash could upgrade him again later. Maybe a Greater Star Dragon form to improve upon the first?
But he didn’t need to carry the damnable thing, just damage it.
Eight, razor-sharp, front claws found the weakened seams where the pieces had been welded together, once upon a time. But heat/cool cycles unquenched metal, had it ever been done right, and made things brittle.
And Gareth was still a little angry at having failed earlier. He sank the tips through the welds like butter and pulled.
In space, everything is relative leverage.
And dragonrage.
He heaved.
A seam parted. Not much, but a crack suddenly ran nearly a meter. Good enough. He shifted his grip to the other side of the stern and did the same thing. This was easier. He had a feel for where it was going to tear.
The sides were going to be harder, except that he could just shift himself around the truck ninety degrees.
Oh, yeah.
He slithered to his right and found a new spot to dig in his toes. Couple of good, solid kicks and he was firmly anchored to the carcass.
This might even work.
Reach around the aft end and grab the side. This weld felt softer than the others. He wondered if the verticals hadn’t been anchored as heavily as the horizontals. That would certainly make this easier.
Torque, and he could see a gap run the entire side of the vehicle.
Gareth had planned to hit the top next, but a lazy welding crew might make this far easier than he had planned. He shifted one hundred and eighty degrees this time, so he could get a grip on the passenger side and attack across.
Sure enough, this set of welds had been seals, rather than structural, like the top and bottom. Possibly to make it easier to get at lights and wires later, but he gave it a good tug and the side came across from the quarter panel.
Okay, now the fun part.
Gareth returned to his original overhead spot, rather than climbing underneath, like he had planned originally. Quick double-check, but Baker was back and staying out of his way, about fifty meters off to his right.
He took a deep breath. Or whatever a Star Dragon did in deep space where there wasn’t any air.
Settled his toes into their holes and grabbed on, foot-fists holding him tightly in place.
Stretch out and over the back of the truck. Grab hold of that panel, right below the door, where the seam had failed earlier.
Pull.
Nothing.
No, unacceptable.
PULL.
Movement. Not much, but proof of concept.
Gareth focused his entire being on that top weld and flexed all the way to the tip of his tail.
It started slowly, failing by millimeters and fighting him for every bit, but it moved. After about three centimeters, something snapped somewhere inside, and the metal began to deform. He pulled more, but the door was warping now as much as it folded. Still, good enough for his purposes.
He let go and flowed around into the opening he had ripped. The back plate gap was about a meter wide, which was enough to get his head, arms, and shoulders inside.
His snout was actually touching the emergency bubble now, and Morty, being Morty, just had to boop him on the snoot with a finger and a laugh that the membrane transmitted.
Gareth rumbled with a laugh, and then set his arms on the floor, using the Elohynn’s throne-like chair as an anchor point. He flexed his shoulder and back up and out, growling with the intensity. The metal moved more, failing under the torque Gareth was forcing into it.
It failed with a snap, breaking loose.
Gareth had hold of the chair, so he didn’t embarrass himself again, with witnesses this time. Instead, he glanced back and caught the back plate with his left foot, holding it in place, more or less. The throne was in the way, so he found the pins holding it to the deck and snapped them off. He slid it around to the side and stuffed it into the front seat, out of his way and the bubble.
He let go and backed out of the cabin, flowing up and over to the driver’s door. His arms weren’t long enough in this form, so he pulled open the door and stuck his head in.
Just because Morty had started it, Gareth head-butted the emergency cocoon once, his own boop that picked it up and shoved it softly out into space, now that the entire rear of the vehicle was wide enough for it to get out without catching on anything.
“Baker,” Gareth rumbled over the radio. “All yours.”
He moved to the top of the truck and snagged the floating panel. After a moment of thought, he stuffed it inside and wedged it well enough to hold. At some point, a tow ship would have to grab the truck and move it to an impound yard. Otherwise, it might fall to earth and maybe have enough metal to survive reentry.
Not good.
Baker was EVA now. Her suit had little jets on the backpack that she used to capture the cocoon, like a sheep dog, and herd them into the open rear door of the truck. The door closed and the three were safe.
Under arrest for a variety of crimes and in really deep doo-doo, but safe from death today, and that was all that mattered right now.
“What about you?” Baker asked, turning her jets to face him as she waited outside the airlock for it to cycle.
“When you get back, open a tube and I’ll fly through it,” Gareth replied.
She was silent for a moment, deep in thought or maybe talking to Grodray on another channel.
“Sun’s coming up over Londra,” she observed. “You’ll be visible.”
“You would never be able to keep something like this secret now anyway,” Gareth retorted. “Might as well make a splash.”
More silence.
“You sure about this, Gareth?”
He heard Grodray’s voice on the line this time. Senior Constable Jackeith Grodray who was secretly a Prime Investigator. A Level-7 instead of a Level-4. The man in charge, but still keeping a very low profile. And he could hide even better in the shadow of a Star Dragon.
“I am,” Gareth rumbled back.
“Very good,” Grodray said. “Stand by.”
A golden portal opened in front of the rescue truck, and the vehicle moved carefully into it, disappearing like a soap bubble on a sunny day.
Gareth waited.
“Okay, Gareth,” Baker said. “We’re clear of the landing point and moving away. You have a clear flight path.”
“Thank you,” he said.
The golden tube in front of him represented all the weirdness that had upended his life over the last two months. Perhaps it was appropriate that it would open the next phase in his cursed, or perhaps charmed existence.
The underworld had been rife with unbelievable tales of a giant, flying lizard hunting bad guys. Nobody would doubt them after this.
And he was also a good guy, rescuing people from certain death.
That legend would take shape as well.
For the briefest, scariest moment, Gareth wondered if his appearance might trigger some bizarre new religion. None of the known species could become a dragon, and nobody would know the truth except a very few on both sides of the law.
Would people think he was one of the Chaa, returned to the Accord of Souls to help fight evil? Would they worship him?
He was sad that Pastor Jacob wasn’t here to advise him, but the man had helped shape him along the way. Gareth would do what was right.
Whatever the cost.
He turned to the golden portal and began to flap, building up speed.
There was a flash of light, over almost before it began, and he was suddenly at gravity’s mercy again.
Down became down, and the morning air had turned so cool that his breath steamed when he let go and drew a new breath into his lungs.
The sun was just above the horizon over Londra, painting the cotton-candy sky almost the same reds as that painting he had experienced last night. She hadn’t been painting the sunset, that Grace woman.
She had been facing the dawn. The new beginning.
Hope.
Gareth let loose a cry of pure joy as he banked over and began to slowly orbit the Hall of Art.
His story was finally beginning.
Yet Higher Mathematics
“I’m concerned about his paper, Loughty,” the man said.
Royston held his tongue. The cluttered oak desk between them, stacked with papers and old tomes, might as well have been a battlefield drawn up between two armies. He had expected what was coming, and wasn’t about to back down one scintilla on this.
Not even to this man could make him: Dr. Sir Westfield van Duren-Abbott, PhD, FRS, GMU, KCB, GBE.
Fellow of the Royal Society. Past Guardian of the Mathematical Union. Knight Grand Cross, Order of the British Empire. Knight Commander, Order of the Bath. Even the best-selling author of a popular book on the shape of the universe and humanity’s place in it.
Sir West was probably the only mathematician alive that the man on the street might recognize by name. Professor Emeritus, King’s College, and all that.
Royston smiled grimly at his old mentor and set his teeth to prevent the growl from escaping his mouth. Now was not the time. Even with Sir West’s office door closed, this was not the place.
Royston leaned himself into the wingback chair and forced his muscles to relax. The walls on three sides of the oversized office were covered with bookshelves, and at least four of his books were in here somewhere, along with all twenty-three of Sir West’s.
When the man realized that Royston wasn’t going to rise to the bait, Sir West sighed.
The man looked every one of his eighty-three years, with a wild fringe of white hair surrounding a sea of liver spots on the bald top. Even his tweeds might be older than Royston. The eyes were hazel most of the time, and gave utter lie to the rest of the man’s unkempt appearance as a fussy old duffer headed down to the pub for a pint.
Sir West had lost barely any of the genius that put him at the top of the field sixty years ago and kept him there.
“Yes, concerned that you’ve gone about this all wrong, Loughty,” the man repeated himself.
“Why is that, Sir West?” Royston finally asked.
If they were going to have to play this game, he was going to make the old man work for it. Simple as that.
“Your co-author, Roy,” Sir West intoned in a severe, almost condescending voice.
“Oh?” Royston fired back innocently.
As if he hadn’t woken up this morning and spent his breakfast and the flight down here to England preparing for this battle.
“I appreciate that she is your daughter,” Sir West equivocated. “And a very sharp girl, but this paper has the potential to utterly destroy your reputation, Loughty. I wouldn’t want hers to suffer any collateral damage.”
“What’s wrong with the contents of the paper, Sir West?” Royston challenged, letting just the thinnest edge of his pique show through.
The man had been his mentor for nearly three decades now. Challenging his genius was like arguing with God himself about things.
“You claim to have invented an entirely new mathematics, Loughty,” the older man was exasperated. “As if your place in history is to rival Newton and Leibniz. Higher dimensions of space? Wormholes? Ye gads, man, that’s the fanciful conjecture of the worst speculative fiction writers. Newton was surpassed by Einstein, but nobody in the last five hundred years has been able to prove the German wrong. And everyone has tried.”
“I’m aware of that, Sir West,” Royston replied with a sniff.
“This paper will get you laughed out of the Royal Society, Loughty,” Sir West pleaded. “Burn it, before anybody else finds out, and I swear I will never mention it again.”
“I’ve already begun designing the first generator, Sir West,” Royston replied.
“You’ve what?”
“The theory supports a certain type of radiation, previously unknown anywhere in any proposed model of physics, being a residue from such a device as an electromagnetic signature,” Royston said.
“So?” the man shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“I’ve seen that radiation,” Royston replied, eyes squinting with fury. “Detected it under circumstances that were utterly impossible to explain. If the security clearance around the incident wasn’t so high, I could tell you about it. Instead I might suggest you ask the Queen when you next have lunch with her. Perhaps a tour of The Arsenal and a look at the bleeding edge of research might be in order, sometime soon.”
He left it at that. That was exactly as much hint as he could offer without getting himself in trouble, but Sir Westfield van Duren-Abbott was a bright enough fellow to understand the clues and follow the breadcrumbs to enlightenment.
If he really wanted to know the truth.
“And this?” he gestured at the folder between them on the desk.
The paper was amazingly thin, as those things went. More than half of it was an Appendix filled with the new vocabulary of terms and symbols Royston had been forced to invent, to try to explore the ideas that took shape under the influence of that young lady’s rock and roll.
The paper itself was an exploration of several higher orders of dimensionality, arranged like layers in a puff pastry and separated by walls of radiation that might be some bizarre, previously-unsuspected residue of the Big Bang itself.
That awaited a future paper to explore. And possibly entire generations of science fiction writers to prove right. He looked forward to dropping a small and rather polite bomb on the Royal Society sometime soon. Possibly by opening a wormhole across the length of a desk and rolling a marble through it. That demonstration might require an entire atomic pile to power it, but the expressions of shock on those old fart’s faces would be worth every pfennig.
“How would you classify this?” the older scientist pressed.
“A roadmap to the future, old man,” Royston snapped. “I don’t know what’s out there, or who, but I have strong suggestions that we’ll find someone when we get there. The rest is just the work of some extremely competent and creative mechanical engineers. I have a number of those on call, up in orbit.”
“So you’re going to go through with it?” Sir West demanded abrasively.
“Indeed,” Royston smiled. He leaned back again, when he realized he had leaned forward far enough to put his hands on the desk again.
“And you will share credit with a woman?” Sir West’s voice got ugly.
“Did you know that King’s College used to admit women into their doctoral programs, Sir West?” Royston purred icily. “That many schools did, back in the old days before Earth Force? Back at the dawn of the Space Age?”
“And next I suppose you’ll tell me that the Etruscans were a co-equal society. And the Vikings and so many others. Ancient history, and she has nothing more than a basic degree.”
“Truth,” Royston acknowledged. “And since no admissions council would grant her leave to attend, she has instead been my principal assistant for several years, when she might have been successfully pursuing such advanced degrees. After me, she’s the only other expert on the topic. If people intend to be snotty enough to me on the matter, I might send her to make all my presentations and remain in my lab in orbit.”
That got the man’s attention. Royston could see Sir West envisioning a woman standing before the Royal Society, dressed in that red skirt and tunic, representing Sky Patrol. They had admitted women once, as well. In the so-called Dark Ages of Technology.
Royston smiled at the possibility of her on the talk shows, describing the work as an equal partner, and not just the daughter of the inventor.
Sir West leaned back in turn, cooling his ardor by force of will. He could see the precipice that Royston had walked him to, like a bear trap hidden in the low grass.
“Let me make a few inquiries,” he half-promised, suddenly understanding the lever Royston held.
Archimedes had warned these bastards, but not enough of them had listened.
“How soon until you build a device?” Sir West asked carefully.
“This one will exceed my current budget,” Royston replied. “I’ll be sending this paper up the chain at Sky Patrol, requesting additional funds and assistance. They have a powerful, vested interest in the topic that I am not at liberty to discuss, currently.”
“Would you consider building it at King’s College?” Sir West asked, dancing expertly around the topic.
“When the Sky Marshal asks me to present my theories to the Secretary, it might be helpful if Her Majesty was willing to chat with the Chancellor on the topic,” Royston allowed.
The Americans would also be quite interested, and willing to throw money at him. And they dominated both Earth Force in general and Sky Force in particular.
Very interested.
Because someone had kidnapped Gareth St. John Dankworth.
The Americans would want to have a friendly chat with those folks.
At least it would start friendly. Americans were like that.
“I shall make some inquiries, Loughty,” Sir West finally temporized. “Will this really potentially give us the galaxy?”
“That is my hope, Sir West,” Royston replied. “That is my goal.”
Witness
Constable Baker smiled as the six people were marched onto the low stage and lined up under extremely bright lights. She was on the other side of a thick window, sitting in darkness with a pair of Yuudixtl men who were practically vibrating with excitement, in spite of the handcuffs around their wrists.
This was all just a formality anyway. Six Elohynn were lined up. Two of them slouched in the uniform of the Constabulary. One of those and another were female. Another was a well-known, local sports reporter with a sense of humor. One was a random stranger off the street, willing to take an hour off and get lunch in the deal.
And one fat, old man Elohynn that had been utterly bullet-proof until yesterday.
She smiled some more, letting it spread so far across her face that she was afraid she might start to glow.
“Number four,” the neared Yuudixtl crowed.
She had only met Morty in the flesh a few hours ago, but she had been reading reports and hearing stories from both Dankworth and Liamssen about the lizardman for nearly two months now. He was just as silly, as sarcastic, and as sharp as they had warned her.
Eveth picked up a microphone and spoke into it.
“Number four, step forward,” she commanded.
It helped that he was the only one wearing cuffs in there, but this was just a formality.
Omerlon took an angry step forward. He looked like he wanted to punch the glass, had his hands been in front. Perhaps he might head-butt it yet.
“That’s him,” the other one said.
Xiomber. Supposedly egg-brother to Morty. Partners in crime and mischief. And willing to spend the last three hours, on tape, detailing every crime they could remember, with names, dates, places, and amounts. And not just Sarzynski’s gang, as these two had spent twenty years being bad guys for a number of outfits.
It would take her weeks, and maybe months to suck these two dry. And they seemed even more excited at the prospect than she did.
Bizarre.
“Morty?” she asked.
“Correct,” Morty said. “Number four.”
“The rest of you may go,” she said into the mic. “Thank you for your service.”
“You bastards got nothing on me,” Omerlon snarled.
“On the contrary, Omerlon,” Baker said with an infectious smile that the other two seemed to have picked up. “I have you on four counts of attempted murder, including attempted murder of a Constabulary Officer.”
Three of the folks in the line-up had departed. The two Elohynn officers were pushing Omerlon the other direction, towards the holding cells.
“May I?” Morty hopped off his stool and approached with a hand out.
Baker shrugged and handed him the microphone.
“Hey, Omerlon,” Morty cat-called the Elohynn crime boss. “You were right. See you in hell.”
He handed her back the mic and moved towards the two officers at the back of the room, almost skipping with glee.
She had no idea what was going on, but this was going to be fun.
Because Omerlon? Yeah, he was about to enter hell.
Home
Gareth entered the research lab as quietly as he could. Talyarkinash was working on a screen with her profile towards him, tracing something on the screen with a nail painted green today. It looked like his silhouette on the screen, so she was probably calculating new options.
He cleared his throat as he got closer.
Talyarkinash turned and blinked in surprise. She took three steps across the lab and engulfed him in a hug, as short as she was.
“You did it,” she said. “I saw you on the morning news. It was glorious. You were glorious.”
Gareth untangled himself a little and leaned back enough to smile at her.
“You did it,” he said. “I was able to rescue Morty and Xiomber in that truck, along with another man, by having Baker bounce me to orbit. I could have never done anything like that without your help.”
“Morty? Xiomber” she cried with joy. “You found them?”
“And arrested them,” Gareth said. “They’re in custody downstairs while Baker and Grodray work out what to do with them.”
“What will happen?” she asked, leaning back herself until they only touched where hands contacted ribs.
“There is a precedence,” he grinned slyly. “Ex-criminals willing to turn state’s evidence and work with the Constabulary.”
“Like you?” she teased.
Gareth’s grin turned into a smile. Technically, he was an illegal alien, illegally upgraded. And trying to do good.
“I might know others,” he teased back. “Have you had breakfast? I’ve been using the Star Dragon form for hours and I’m famished. Plus, I want to talk to you about some things. I had a lot of time up in space alone, since the others were trapped in an emergency cocoon. They could wave, but I had nobody to talk to except Baker and Grodray.”
She stepped back and turned to her workstation, hitting a button to save everything and power it down for now.
“I would love to join you for breakfast, Gareth,” she said. “What did you need?”
“On the one hand, I have a few questions about maybe upgrading the Star Dragon,” he replied. “Or maybe creating a second, larger form I could shift into when I needed to go beyond the normal for size and strength.”
“Okay,” she said, moving towards the door and opening it. “That’s actually along the lines of what I have been working on up until now. What was the second part?”
“How will the average person react to seeing me as a dragon?” Gareth asked. “I will become a symbol of fear to the criminals, which was what I intended, but will the rest of the Accord of Souls see me as one of the Chaa returned? Will they think I’m a god?”
“Oh, Gareth,” she leaned close and placed a palm on the chest of his grinder wool blazer. “That’s not something I can help you with. You’ll need a priest, or maybe a philosopher.”
“No,” Gareth corrected her. “What I need is a friend.”
About the Author
Blaze Ward writes science fiction in the Alexandria Station universe (Jessica Keller, The Science Officer, The Story Road, etc.) as well as several other science fiction universes, such as Star Dragon, the Collective, and more. He also writes odd bits of high fantasy with swords and orcs. In addition, he is the Editor and Publisher of Boundary Shock Quarterly Magazine. You can find out more at his website www.blazeward.com, as well as Facebook, Goodreads, and other places.
Blaze's works are available as ebooks, paper, and audio, and can be found at a variety of online vendors. His newsletter comes out regularly, and you can also follow his blog on his website. He really enjoys interacting with fans, and looks forward to any and all questions—even ones about his books!
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Also by Blaze Ward
The Jessica Keller Chronicles
CS-405
Additional Alexandria Station Stories
Two Bottles of Wine With A War God
The Science Officer Series
The Handsome Rob Gigs
Can’t Shoot Straight Gang
Can’t Shoot Straight Gang Returns
Hunting Handsome Rob
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Star Dragon
Box Set One
Blaze Ward
Copyright © 2020 Blaze Ward
All rights reserved
Published by Knotted Road Press
www.KnottedRoadPress.com
ISBN: 978-1-64470-133-1
Cover art:
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Cover and interior design copyright © 2019 Knotted Road Press
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This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.